“The World May Never Know”: 69 Urban Legends That Still Give People Chills

Our university campus has an old homeless man that lives on it, he is absolutely harmless, never speaks but always gives you a smile and a nod. He gets free meals and coffee in the canteen and spends his day ambling about the campus. There are loads of origin stories. He was a professor who had a break down, or he saved a girl from being [attacked] one night and has since been the silent guardian of the university. When the restaurant came under new management they refused to feed him for free, the entire student body boycotted the place and he got his dinners. No one knows who he is, what he did or why the university lets him stroll about. Every new generation has a new story and everyone loves "old man Belfield."


EDIT: Getting lots of questions asking "Why doesn't someone just speak to him?". In the 20 odd years he's been about many people have tried, he never talks, just smiles and nods.

Bristol UK

At the city zoo a parking attendant dutifully tended the car parks taking fees and wishing people well.

After 35 years one day he didn't turn up for work and so the zoo called the local council to ask for a stand in.
The council said they had never provided a parking attendant and he must be a zoo employee.

The zoo had never employed a parking attendant either.
This rouge who no one seemed to know by name had been collecting parking charges for 35 years unquestioned.

It is estimated he made in the region of £2,000,000 over the years and decided to retire.
Probably somewhere much nicer than Bristol.

Here in Ireland there's ruined castles scattered all over the place. In the walls of one of them, near a small rural town called Blarney, there's a stone which is supposed magically make you an eloquent speaker (ie the 'gift of the gab') if you kiss it. Its not easy to get to. You have to climb to the top of the castle, and then lie on your back with your head hanging over a sheer drop. I kid you not, millions (literally) of tourists have undergone this farcical ritual. Apart from the hygiene issues, how can any sane person believe that a lump of rock could possess this ability. Needless to say, I'm not one of the locals who is profiting from this paddywhackery.

Overtoun Bridge.

There's a old house to the north of my hometown in Scotland called Overtoun House, and the legend goes that walking your dog along the bridge that leads up to the house will cause it to spontaneously leap from the bridge.

This is an observable thing that actually has happened at least 50 times.

People will refuse to cross the bridge, as there are also people who report feeling suddenly and unexpectedly depressed after crossing. There was even a man who threw his baby son off the bridge in a fit of insanity after claiming his son was the Antichrist.

There's an old Scottish myth of a "Thin Place" where the afterlife and the physical world are very close together; Overtoun Bridge is said to be one of these places.

I'm not sure if it classifies as an urban legend as such, but anyway.

The majority of my state truly believes an animal officially declared extinct still roams around in various parts and sightings are still often reported. There is also some secrecy among small communities and locals who have had sightings or encounters with the animal.

Yes, I live in Tasmania and it's the Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine).

The chupacabras, which is spanish for "goat sucker".

Weirdly enough, most chupacabra legends involve farmers finding their chickens deceased and drained of blood, without any visible wound. Why it is not called chupagallina is beyond me...

But anyway, growing up Catholic, my parents used to tell me that the chupacabra isn't real. It was just a satanic cult using chickens for their rituals. Yeah... thanks mom, that's way less terrifying.

Green eyes. I live near the Chickamauga Battlefield and there is an old story of a ghost soldier. You can ride through the battlefield at night and sometimes you'll see a pair of green eyes and that's the soldier. It's actually just deer.

Edit: it's a fun story that parents tell their kids so when they drive through at night, they look for green eyes and then freak out when they see them. I LOVED driving through at night trying to spot ol green eyes.

Ogopogo. It's kinda like the Loch Ness Monster, only in Okanagan Lake, BC.

Big sea snake.

Just to get it outta the way: something something Tree Fiddy.

I grew up in a small rural village in Ireland (still in Ireland, just in the city now). There's some woods up the hill across from my parents' house that has a fairy ring it. Our elderly neighbour Jim once told us that he wandered into the woods one night when he was a teenager, and wasn't able to find his way out until morning because the fairies trapped him. There's also a story of a banshee residing there, which terrified my sister.

Raymond "Ray" Robinson (October 29, 1910 – June 11, 1985) was a severely disfigured man whose years of nighttime walks made him into a figure of urban legend in western Pennsylvania. Robinson was so badly injured in a childhood electrical accident that he could not go out in public without fear of creating a panic, so he went for long walks at night. Local tourists, who would drive along his road in hopes of meeting him, called him The Green Man or Charlie No-Face. They passed on tales about him to their children and grandchildren, and people raised on these tales are sometimes surprised to discover that he was a real person who was liked by his family and neighbors.

We have this huge rock very close to our church, but there isn't really any mountains close by so it is said a giant threw it there when it got annoyed by the church bells. Porvoo, Finland.

In Ireland, we have the urban legend of the banshee, an old lady who can be heard screaming in the woods. If you hear the banshee wailing, someone you know will [pass away]. If you see a banshee, it's too late.

St. Michaels, Maryland. The legend is that when the British came in the war of 1812, we hung our lanterns from the trees instead of our houses and their cannonfire overshot our town entirely. The only house hit, the "Cannonball House", is a tourist destination. We are referred to as "The Town That Fooled The British", right on our sign welcoming you into the town.

Sadly, none of that happened. We're the town that fooled the tourists.

EDIT: The House totally got hit, I meant the bit about the lanterns didn't happen.

The library in my hometown is attached to a 200+ year old mansion that was said to be haunted. Specifically, the attic, which is huge and shadowy and tends to collect deceased pigeons. The local paper even did a story about the supposed haunting, with photo 'proof'. The library did lock-in nights in the summer and they'd tell scary stories in the attic, which wasn't so bad because you were with a group...later on I ended up working at the library and would have to go up in the attic, alone, at night to make sure no one stayed behind after we closed. The attic had a gated stairway with a lock, and a few times when I was up there, alone in the house, I'd hear it bang shut.

Good old Black Annis!

Black Annis, also known as Black Agnes, is a bogeyman figure in English folklore. She is imagined as a blue-faced crone or witch with iron claws and a taste for humans (especially children). She is said to haunt the countryside of Leicestershire, living in a cave in the Dane Hills, with an oak tree at its entrance.

She supposedly goes out onto the glens at night looking for unsuspecting children and lambs to eat, then tanning their skins by hanging them on a tree, before wearing them around her waist. She would reach inside houses to snatch people. Legend has it that she used her iron claws to dig into the side of a sandstone cliff, making herself a home there which is known as Black Annis's Bower. The legend led to parents warning their children that Black Annis would catch them if they did not behave.

Location: Basel - Switzerland

We have this "urban legend" which came up somewhere around the 11th century. Some poems still survived and it still is our city's crest animal.

It says that under a certain fauntain we have some kind of "Chamber of Secrets" where, once upon a time, a basilisk has made his nest. He had a chicken's head and feet, and a lizard-ish body with Dragon-like wings. It was said that he was born when a chicken abandoned an egg, which got adopded and hatched by a snake. He used to roam the streets at night and hunt for his chicken mother who abandoned him, but wouldn't make hold for a human either.

Today we still got basilisk-statues on every fountain in the city.

We have competent politicians who are doing their all for the city.

People from my home county of Wiltshire are sometimes referred to as "moonrakers". There's a legend stating that during the 18th century when smuggling was common in the west country, smugglers would hide barrels of French brandy in a local pond or lake, which they would fish out of the water after dark using rakes.

One night, the smugglers were caught in the act by the police and when asked what they were doing, they said that they were trying to rake in the wheel of "cheese" that was floating in the water. The "cheese" was actually the reflection of the moon in the water and assuming the smugglers were simpletons, the police went on their way, oblivious to what the smugglers were really doing.

Poland: Black Volga (czarna wołga). This is quite an old one, from the communist times, so people born in the 90s or later might not know it.

Basically, the legend goes that there is this black car, called Volga, cruising Poland and abducting children. There are multiple versions of this urban legend, but in the one I've heard the Devil himself drove the car.

It was used as a bit of cautionary tale, told to kids so that they don't get into cars with strangers, I think.

In Paducah, KY there is a legend that nearby in the KY dam, there are catfish as big as VW Bugs. Story goes that divers doing work down there swore to never go back down again.