How many times have you heard a story so outrageous that it couldn’t possibly be true only to be told by the storyteller, “No, I swear. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine”?
Urban legends have been around for centuries, captivating people with story lines that often seem too far out to be considered actual fact.
In the spirit of Halloween, Global News consulted the research of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand and author Tim O’Shei to find four urban legends that have stood the test of time and still resonate with people today.
But what makes these top four legends stand out isn’t their entertainment factor, it’s the fact that they have actually happened in real life.
We also spoke with Elissa Henken, professor of folklore and Celtric studies at the University of Georgia, to discuss what makes a story worthy of urban legend status and why we find them so fascinating.
Urban legends explained
The term “urban legend” is a misleading term and the more appropriate term used among experts is “contemporary legends,” Henken says.
When folklorists first began noticing these types of legends were circulating, they recognized they were being spread within urban settings, she explains. However, experts quickly realized that the spreading of stories had nothing to do with being in an urban setting and eventually changed the term to “contemporary legends.”
But what they are, she says, are actually warnings in the form of gossip to constrict outrageous behaviour in favour of conformity.
“One of the things we see with contemporary legends is that although they often deal with very outrageous behaviour and describe outrageous things, they’re actually very conservative in nature,” says Henken. “They deal with contemporary concerns that has presumably happened in the recent past or that have affected us at the time. Sometimes its within the local community or at a distance or it can be related to a famous person or an unspecified person.”
Another thing about contemporary legends, she says, is the cycle in which they start and circulate.
According to Henken, stories that start off as fictional will make their way into the media because someone in the world has turned that legend into a reality by acting it out.
Think of it as a “chicken vs. egg” situation.
As for why we love them so much, it may have to do with their entertainment factor and intrigue.
“We share legends in the same way we share news and gossip,” says Henken. “Most often they come out as filling people in and we’re sharing it as what we consider to be useful information. There are times where we don’t believe it at all but we still get a thrill out of it maybe because we like spooking somebody or we like the shiver it sends down our own spines as we think about that possibility.”
The top four legends
(Note: The contemporary legends described here may have several different versions that have circulated over time.)
1. The Kidney Heist
The legend: This is a story that many seasoned travellers are familiar with.
The story starts with a man who is travelling for business. He sits down at an airport lounge and sips on a drink. As he’s finishing his drink, a stranger walks up to him and offers to buy him another.
The next thing he knows, he’s waking up in a hotel bath tub filled with ice up to his neck. Beside him is a phone on a small table and a note taped to the wall telling him not to move and to call 911.
The man reaches a 911 operator who has become familiar with this type of crime. The operator instructs the man to carefully reach behind him and see if there is a tube coming out of his lower back, which the man finds. The operator tells him to remain still and that paramedics are already on their way.
At this point the 911 operator knows that both the man’s kidneys have been harvested.
In the news: As unbelievable as this story may seem, this was the experience of one Indian man named Mohammad Salin Khan in 2008.
According to ABC News, Khan – who is a labourer – stood at a gathering spot one day where many labourers wait to be offered job opportunities. He was approached for construction work, which he accepted.
He was lead to a house (which had a secret operating room), held at gunpoint and then drugged. When he awoke, he was in a lot of pain and noticed scars around his waist. His kidney had been taken. There were also two other men in the room with him who had just experienced the same fate.
The three men were then threatened with their life if they told anyone about what they experienced.
A few hours later, police raided the home and rescued Khan and his roommates, as well as two other men who were in line to get their kidneys removed.
If the police raid had not happened, then two people by the names of Joy and Susan Mathew of Hawthore, N.Y. would have received the kidneys from the scam. The married couple had travelled to India to bypass the long wait times the U.S. was experiencing for kidney transplants.
2. The Call From Inside the House (aka Have You Checked The Children?)
The legend: It’s nighttime and the babysitter is in the family’s living room as the children she is caring for are upstairs sleeping.
The phone rings and she picks it up. “Have you checked the children?” a menacing voice asks. Feeling uneasy, she hangs up the phone. This happens a few times until she gets a call telling her that he has killed the children and will soon kill her, too.
At this point she is too scared to check on the children and calls the police. They tell her to keep the man on the line as long as possible if he calls back so they can trace where the call is coming from.
After another phone call from the man the police call her back and tell her to get out of the house right away.
When she meets a policeman outside of the house he tells her the calls were traced to the upstairs phone line.
Police catch the man and find that he’s already murdered the children.
In the news: Earlier this year, a 44-year-old man named Craig Myczkowski of Manhattan made this age-old story very much a reality for one babysitter in Woodmere, New York.
It was Jan. 12 and a 65-year-old woman (who police did not name) was out for a walk with a 20-month-old girl she was looking after when she was approached by Myczkowski, the NY Daily News reports.
Myczkowski told the sitter that she was “pushing a dead baby,” which spooked the woman, prompting her to get back home quickly. But Myczkowski wasn’t far behind her.
When she got inside the house, he walked through the unlocked door, into a mud room and tried to get through the kitchen door. He demanded the sitter hand over the “dead baby.”
Myczkowski took off with the stroller (without the baby), which he later disposed of at a nearby pizza restaurant. Police found him and took him to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was later charged with attempted unlawful imprisonment, child endangerment, burglary and petty larceny.
3. Insects in Your Head
The legend: It’s the 1960s — a time when go-go boots and Nancy Sinatra hair were a thing.
A big school dance is just a month away and one fashionable teenage girl wanted to make sure her hair would be perfect, so she got a head start on her hairdo.
One night before bed the girl washed her hair with sugar water, pulled it up straight and wrapped it up before bed. When she awoke, her hair had formed into a hard beehive hairstyle.
Over the weeks the girl did not wash her hair and would go through several cans of hairspray to keep her ‘do in check.
But then she began to feel sick and have terrible headaches.
One day in class the girl got another headache; it was the worst one yet. The girl yelled in pain and her head fell on her desk. Blood could be seen running down her cheek.
As it turns out, a family of bugs made a home in the girl’s hair and had been eating away at her scalp all the way into her brain.
In the news: In early 2015, 31-year-old Yadira Rostro of Texas began suffering from very painful headaches as well as nausea and dizziness. It wasn’t until August when she eventually saw a doctor about her symptoms.
According to The Daily Mail, doctors believed she had a brain tumor when they saw the results of a CT scan they had ordered.
However, her conditioned worsened and her eyesight would sometimes be impaired.
But when doctors ordered another MRI scan and saw the results, they saw Rostro didn’t have brain cancer — she had tapeworm eggs in the base of her brain.
Doctors had to perform surgery to take the eggs out, which looked like clear sacks of jelly.
As to how she contracted the parasites, Rostro had visited family in Mexico two years prior and believes she may have eaten contaminated food. The parasite travelled through her bloodstream and into her brain through the gastrointestinal tract.
4. The Accidental Cannibals:
The legend: During the Second World War, many families in Yugoslavia experienced major food shortages across the country. To help, their relatives in the U.S. would send over care packages — labeled tins filled with food — to help their family overseas during their time of need.
But one family, however, received a care package with a tin that did not come with a label. When they opened it they saw it was a powder and assumed it was a food supplement or some sort of spice.
During their next meal, every member of the family sprinkled some of the powder over their food and liked how it gave life to their otherwise bland meal. They loved it so much that they polished off the tin.
A few weeks later they received a letter in the mail that described the contents of the package.
The letter said their grandmother — who had been living in the U.S. — had died and her cremated remains were sent back to her home country… in the unlabeled tin.
In the news: In 2013, a chef named David Viens of Los Angeles was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison after it was discovered he had killed his wife and then cooked her remains.
Back in 2009, David’s wife Dawn had gone missing which prompted her sister to file a missing persons report, The Daily Mail reports.
During the police’s investigation, David had become the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance.
According to David’s own testimony (which he later refuted), he first told police he had restrained her with duct tape before he dozed off. He claims he had done this in the past to prevent her from driving intoxicated. Eventually he woke up and panicked when he saw that she was dead.
In his second testimony, however, he revealed he had stuffed her body in a 55-gallon drum of boiling water, cooked her for four days, let her body cool and then “strained it out.” He then got rid of the rest of the remains by dumping some in the trash and in a grease pit at his restaurant.