35 Urban Legends That Were Unexpectedly True After All

Not really a legend, unless you didn't believe it,

My town and surrounding area has multiple old pirate smuggling tunnels under it, going from towns to beaches.
Most of the tunnels are under pub or shop basements.
Also when I say pirate I do mean arrrrr pirates.

Penzance, UK.

I went to a University near Valley Forge, PA. It used to be a POW camp and a Military Hospital before the college bought the entire property for one dollar in the 1960s (?) Since there are really only three universities near Valley Forge, PA it will not be hard to deduce which college it was lol

Anyways, there was a rumor that underground tunnels and all sorts of stuff was left abandoned in the abandoned sections of the college.

Sure enough, it was true. We found a tunnel hatch under our carpet in our dorm room (two hatches on the first floor....furthest most first floor dorm room of each building)

It was literally like stepping into 1945. Everything was preserved down there and the tunnels were massive. We eventually ended up in an "underground garage" where there were 4 Jeeps parked but all the tires had dry rotted. We realized this was actually beneath our soccer field.

Anyways, the tunnels lead to the cafeteria, the admin building, every dorm, and then an old abandoned section of our campus that we had no way of entering top side. We soon realized this was the hospital/morgue

When we got out of the tunnels and walked the floor it was still like 1945. All the hospital beds were still there, the surgical curtains were still there. Hell, even the tools (like the scalpel, saw, plyers, etc) were still on their trays.

It was like everyone all of the sudden up and left and nothing had been moved since then. The morgue still had its slabs and sometimes we would dare each other to slide in there for a period of time.

But yeah, it was an urban legend on campus until three of us decided to risk expulsion to see if it was true. And it was.

The North Pond Hermit. Things would go missing in this little vacation community and people attributed it to some mysterious dude. Turned out there was one, he lived out in the woods for 27 years without ever talking to anyone.

EDIT: He said "hi" to a hiker once during that 27 years. Best friend he ever had.

The ghost squirrel in my hometown of Dorking, UK. There was a ghost squirrel, called Albi, that was only ever seen in the graveyard at the church in town. Turns out, it was an albino squirrel that had a nest in one of the trees in the graveyard.

I live near a lake and there was an urban legend that there were huge lake monsters near the Hydroelectric dam.

Most people thought it was just some fishermen's tall tales, we all guessed it was just a twist on the classic 'the one that got away'.

Turns out divers went into the water behind the dam for a routine inspection to see if there was any damage after months of heavy flooding in the area. Apparently one of the divers got too close to what he originally thought was a large moss covered rock/boulder until it moved and tried to latch on to the divers arm. Apparently there are +-200 lb catfish behind the dam which thrive on the fish that go through the hydroelectric portion of the dam, the agitated water makes it easier for the large catfish to breath and grow past what is commonly found in the area, and the lack of fishers as all commercial fishing is banned for at least 1000 meters means these fish are truly free to grow to truly enormous sizes.

In Kenya mombasa there was a story about a woman with long black hair and a white dress who would be seen around the beach at night and it was to stop people from being at the beach swimming in the ocean. Turned out to be true. An older lady would sleep walk on the beach in her nighties. Even she didn't know until locals found the courage to follow her home.

The Wyckoff Wanderer, Wyckoff, NJ.

The myth was that an old man would wander the streets at night looking for his daughter who got hit by a fire truck or ambulance, can't remember.

Anyway, me and my friends were in high school driving home and we see him!

We pull over and start a conversation with him. I don't remember if we asked about his daughter or whatever but turns out he had a light sensitivity so he only walks at night.

He offered me a cigarette, a rollie, which I took but I don't smoke.

Really nice guy, just lonely.

Raymond Robinson: The Green Man.

Dude lost his eyes and nose and wandered the streets at night in Pennsylvania because he couldn’t go outside in the daytime because of how he looked. People saw him and an urban legend in PA was born.

The Rat Man. In Southampton, it was rumoured that the reason there were so many rats about was because there was a mysterious man who would find secluded spots of unlit footpaths at night, and feed the rats raw meat. He would go somewhere else each night so the council couldn't catch him. I always assumed it was a silly campus legend.

Then my friend met him!

Well, it turned out to be rather dull. He exchanged a few words with him, my friend told him he shouldn't feed the rats, he said that they needed food, then he was on his way.

Black Volga.
In the 60s and 70s, there existed and urban legend in poland, that vampires in black limousines were kidnapping people, preferingly little children.
It was a tale parents told their kids who would then tell their friends etc.
Turns out it was a rumour that was spread by the polish secret police who actually used black cars to kidnapp people.
The aim was that no one would believe someone who would report they had witnessed a kidnapping.

There's an urban legend in my town about a guy who hacked up his wife and kids to keep them from leaving him, then went to her closest friends and started picking them off one by one. It's one of those stories that gets told by the campfire to creep people out because this guy hid in the woods from police for about a month before he was caught. Thing is, it's not a legend. My family doesn't talk about it much, but we were on his list. His wife had knitted my baby blanket. We had to go into protective custody while he was on the loose.

Girls at LSU would wake up thinking they were being watched & snuggled up against while sleeping. Turns out a guy broke in 12+ girls homes and snuggled them, ate their food etc and would slip out their windows. He was dubbed the serial snuggler.

The man that worked in a law firm on the 24th storey of a building. As a running gag, he would tell everyone that the windows in the building were unbreakable, then proceed to run at one of them full full force. Once, he did it and the glass didn't break, but the window popped out of the frame, and he fell 24 stories.

I saw this on an urban legend show when I was a kid, but found out later that this really happened in my city, Toronto, Canada. My boyfriend works in the same building and rumour has it that the man landed on a concrete bench at concourse level, a woman and her child had just been sitting there minutes before his fatal plunge.

*Throwaway since I tell this story irl*

There was an urban legend at my high school that one of the janitors quit because he saw a set of bloody footprints down the hallway.

My bad that was me.

One day, I was staying late to complete a class project and dropped a heavy glass pane on my toe. It left a huge gash that I couldn't get to stop bleeding. Now, my school was the kinda place where having a shoe full of blood would get you a weeks detention instead of a hospital visit so I make sure to check around before I limped on home to bandage myself up.

Our high school was a rectangle with a sunken library in the middle so we had hallways that framed it. I was at one corner and at the other end was the janitor finishing up mopping the hallway.

As soon as he turned the corner, I took off my shoes and socks since they were so full of blood I couldn't property walk and walked down the hallway and out the door. This left a perfect trail of bloody footprints all the way until the hallway dried out, which happened to be exactly where the exit door was.

As the rest of the story goes, he turned around when he heard the door close and found a trail of bloody footprints down the hallway with no one there to take responsibility. Dude quit on the spot.

Sorry to freak you out Janitor, ghosts aren't real (or at least don't do that).

In Liverpool, kids are taught about Purple Aki from a young age. He’s been locally known and feared for honestly three decades. He likes feeling boys’ muscles and makes them do squats. He’s completely real, he’s even had court orders against him preventing him from feeling people’s muscles.

We had an older couple that would come into the store I worked at when I was 15. They clearly had mental development/mental health problems and the rumor was they were siblings and the two teenage girls with them were their children.

About 5 years later I'd find out someone had called the state about them and turns out (from what I remember) to be mostly true. The parents were apparently the result of incest and they carried on the family tradition, as it were. I think the state removed their daughters and put them in state custody since they weren't able to take care of themselves, and I don't remember what happened to the parents.

There was an older guy in my hometown that we would call The SquirrelMan or Aqualung (after the Jethro Tull song). He wouldn't really talk to anyone, but he was always in one of the parks, and he always had squirrels on and around him. He'd feed them and apparently raise them. He always wore a black and red flannel jacket.

The Legend was that he could talk to the squirrels because the guy was on some sort of perma-trip.

Talking to my dad years later, it turns out he kinda knew the guy before he was like that, and that one night he had fallen asleep on a park bench with an entire sheet of acid in his pocket, and it had rained. So the guy really was permanently messed up, in a way.

Weather or not he could actually communicate with squirrels will always be up in the air however.

In the small town I'm from there was one "homeless" guy. He technically lived with his mother but wasnt there much. His nick name was Sweet Pea. He was a big dude and of course developmentally disabled. He used to wander the town at night. Totally harmless but there's always that "better watch it or Sweet Pea will get you!" Well while he was wandering he used to go around to all the gas stations and collect the last little bit of oil left in all the oil cans in the trash. Everyone joked that he was actually rich from selling that oil. Well when his mom passed away, the went to go clean her house out. And he had 10 55 gallon drums of oil in his garage. He was selling it and that's how they survived financially.

When I was a kid, my dad would take me and my brother to High Rock. It's a neat overlook and we could play on the rocks. It was fun, but also a little sobering (as much as things can be for kids) because a girl had passed away in a hang gliding accident if I remember right.

As you drive up to the parking lot for the overlook the road continues on into the woods. We asked our dad where it went and he told us that you'd be driving down the road and suddenly armed guards would pop out of the woods to stop you because there was a secret government base there.

That's the case, except it isn't really secret. It's Raven Rock, which is a nuclear bunker that can act as a remote Pentagon if the country is attacked. Cheney went there during Sept 11 while Bush was taken somewhere else. You will be detained if you trespass on the property.

I went back to High Rock a few years ago while visiting family and while hanging out at the overlook a truck of teenagers showed up. They asked if I knew what was up the access road and I told them Raven Rock and not to keep going because they'd be detained. They decided they wanted to check it out anyway. An hour later when I left High Rock those kids had not come back yet, so I figured they were getting chewed out by a soldier.

Fun fact: Raven Rock is the headquarters of the Enclave in Fallout 3!

When I was a kid, my buddy lived in the same neighborhood as the Jesus/Charles Manson-looking guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. When we would hang out at my friend's house, we would always see the guy and joke that he was a criminal or something. Lots of us figured he was somehow crazy and we'd create these hypothetical scenarios of the crazy stuff he must be doing. Then one day we see him on the news and realize we might have been in a lot more danger than we thought.