I know of quite a few urban legends myself. I was hoping some of you could share a few that you know.

One of my favorites, that I remember from my childhood (25 years ago or so), is about the kid from the Life cereal commercials "Mikey". The story went that Mikey, (Apparently being an extreme sugar freak) Downed 5 or 6 cans of coke and chased it with a few packets of Pop Rocks candy. Apparently because of all the carbon dioxide being released from the candy and Coke, His poor stomach could not vent it fast enough and it exploded! Mikey of course died from this.

Now this sound kind of funny, But when I was a kid this was a BIG deal. Every kid I knew was afraid to eat Pop Rocks and drink Coke and every parent banned Pop Rocks from their kids candy lists. This went on and was accepted as general FACT for quite a number of years until "Mikey", In his older incarnation (He was about 24 or so in this instance) Showed up in another Life cereal commercial! Well, jaws hit the floor faster than Pop Rocks sales did when the whole incident started. No one could believe it was all a hoax. And a very serious hoax at that. Pop Rocks were actually taken off the market because of this whole thing.

Here's a link to the Pop Rocks website if anyone is interested.

http://www.poprockscandy.com/history.html

It actually has the whole history of the incident right there on the page.

Its amazing how these things can get started and then, Fueled by speculation and fear, they can grow into something that can actually get a product taken off the market.

Well... that's one of mine. Anyone else have one?

Tim

One of my favorites is actually a Japanese urban legend I first heard in the Philippines.

As the story goes, a young man and woman who are just married and on their honeymoon in the United States are shopping in a market in a rural bazaar. The young woman goes into a changing room and never comes out again. The young man is panic stricken and searches all over for her. Eventually, distraught and exhausted, he returns to the hotel where the concierge gives him a message from his wife that says she can't go through with their life together and has run away. Heartbroken, he checks out of the hotel and returns home to Japan.

Many years pass, and eventually the young man gets transferred to Manila by the company he works for. In Manila, he meets a Filipino woman and falls in love with her. Eventually he proposes marriage and she accepts. On the night of his bachelor party, he and his friends stumble into a run down back alley brothel after a night of carousing. The young man decides not to go upstairs with the prostitutes and instead sits in the lounge watching a graphic adult themed freak show. He is amazed to discover when he looks up that one of the performers, who has no arms or legs, is the wife that ran off in America. He charges the stage and scoops her up and runs out of the place and she explains tearfully that she was abducted through a trap door in the dressing room, was mutilated by her kidnappers and sold into slavery. In the version I was told, the man then takes her home and she and his new fiancée and him all live together to this day outside of Cebu city.

I grew up in this area and drove down this road many times.
Yes, strange things occur on this road and in the graveyard beside it.

Throughout all stories of Annie's Road one thing is agreed upon, Annie is said to have been killed on the road. The story has evolved into versions ranging from the girl being killed on her wedding night and then being dragged along the road.
One story tells of Annie being stood up at her prom, and in her dismay decided to get drunk and walk along the road; soon, however, she is said to have been hit by a car full of drunk students returning from prom. Locals have many different versions of Annie's story.

Alongside of the road was a guardrail painted red, where she died. Local's stories say that on the eve of her death every year her deranged father returns to paint it, supposedly because he wants to be with his daughter once more.

Every time a person passes by Annie's Road at midnight they will supposedly see her ghost walking along the road, and she also is said to appear every year on the anniversary of her death. One witness described seeing Annie as: "When you see her she appears to be a rather short girl who is dressed all in white who usually wisps away shortly after appearing." Right beside the road at the east end is a cemetery where Annie is allegedly buried.

Jaz---

Holy cow! When I was a kid, I heard the same story near where I live. In our case, it was down one of the long country roads (I'm originally from Iowa). The girl in question, known as Lilac Lily (lilac was the color of her dress), was "parking" with her boyfriend after the prom and the story-required heavy drinking. He got too fresh, she stomped out and walked down the road. In his drunken haze, he drove too fast trying to find her and killed her when his car slid on the gravel road.

Ghost stalks at midnight, blah blah blah.

Another macabre one is from a local YMCA camp I went to as a kid. Allegedly some kid had drowned in the deep end of the pool one year. As a memory his parents had donated a large wooden cross. The cross was in the dining hall, although I serious doubt the veracity of the claims of its origins. Anyway, the story stated that if you put the cross in the shallow end of the pool it would float all the way to the deep end, right over the spot where the unfortunate kid had been found.

When I eventually became the counselor at that same camp, I spent many a night around a camp fire telling that same story to wide eyed kids. Those were the days...

All through high school I'd regularly hear an urban legend about a place called "gravity hill", and I eventually found out it had a grain of truth to it. The story went that supposedly a school bus had had a terrible accident on this country road, possibly stuck on train tracks, and that the children from the bus now haunted the road. If you went there, put your car in neutral and put baby powder on the bumper, the children would push the car up the hill and leave handprints on the bumper.

So one night when we had nothing to do, my buddies and I actually found someone who knew where the hill was. Spent most of the night driving through the middle of nowhere in NE PA and eventually got to the hill (though we forgot the powder). So I threw the trusty old Astrovan into neutral, and it actually did roll up the hill! Of course, when I heard the story I pictured a full fledged hill, and when we got there it was actually nowhere near a hill...an incline, but that's it.

Found out years later that many places have this type of thing, and usually it is even also called gravity hill, and isn't an incline at all, but just the illusion of one. But hey, it definitely provided a night of excitement for a bunch of 17 year olds.

Located near a swampy area Heartbeat Rd. is back woods road in NJ where albinos supposedly lived. Located in Lincoln Park, Heart Beat Rd. (actually Peace Valley Rd) gets its name because according to legend you can hear and feel the heartbeat of a local child with an oversized heart.

Over the years many people including myself have visited this road at night and have heard the heart beating.


Some of us knew that it was an old stone pump house a few yards into the swamp.
From what I understand, the beating has stopped.

After countless hours on Snopes.com, I think this one is my favorite:

(I think this is how it goes)
A teenage girl is babysitting for a family with two young children. Since the parents don't want to get into the habit of using television as a babysitter, they have one set in the house, and it is in the parents' bedroom. They tell the babysitter that after the children are asleep, she can watch TV in their room. She gets the children in bed, and after they are asleep, she goes into the bedroom to watch TV till the parents get home. The parents call to check to make sure everything is okay, and the babysitter tells them that the kids are fast asleep, and she's watching TV, but she wants to know if it's okay if she covers up that clown statue in the bedroom....it's creeping her out with that wild stare. They tell her to hang up the phone, gather the children, and leave the house immediately...they will call the police....they don't have a clown statue in the bedroom! Needless to say, the police have no trouble catching that psycho running down the street dressed as a clown!

My Turn....

It goes like this...

"A friend of mine went to a wedding last week and it was a beautiful ceremony. Everything seemed perfect and after a great dinner at the reception the bride stood up and was making toasts. At the very end she wanted to toast her brides made for sleeping with her groom to be and announced the wedding was off.

She then told everyone to reach under there seats and under each seat was a photo of the brides made and groom in bed, caught in the act!"

LOL... I've heard this one 3 times in my life.

Best,

Tim

She "called off" the wedding after the ceremony? That doesn't make sense.

Hi Opus,

The first key to any of these stories is that they contain a "long shot" or something that doesn't make sense. LOL

In this case the kicker is that the bride waited until after the wedding to embarrass her brides maid and groom.

Technically the wedding can still be called off no problem. It is not an official marriage until after it is consummated and thus is can be annulled.

Best,

Tim

OK.

A few of my favorites are The Mexican Pet, Lionel Ritchie's dogs, Bare-butt Skier, and the double-barrelled Roofer/Exploding Toilet stories.

My favorite comes from my youth. 7th grade. Someone had a tape recorder and played the song "Love Rollercoaster" over and over again on the bus to school, and we listened to the scream of a girl being murdered over and over again.

It's my favorite because it made such an impression on me back then. You can go to Snopes and hear the clip for yourselves. Great memory.

While not really an urban legend, this story is true, and relates to the Pop Rocks one, and is also a lesson for any of you scuba divers out there...

A couple of years ago, I went to EPCOT at Disney in Florida (okay, I go there a lot, but this story was from a few years ago). If you're a certified scuba diver, you can book a tour at The Living Seas pavilion; specifically, you can dive in the exhibit and be part of the show. One of the things in the exhibit is this diving bubble, or bell, with a Canadian flag on it (for those of you who've been there). Part of the dive allows you to go inside, take off your mask and regulator and be 30 feet down with no mask, etc. So where am I going with this?

During the orientation lecture, they told us that on a prior Thanksgiving holiday, some of the workers there packed up a turkey dinner and took it down there and they ate dinner in the diving bell. Problem is, one guy brought a Coke down there with him. No you divers know that drinking a Coke on the surface and then diving is not really a bright idea, but not horrible. But, drink it at depth and then surface, and all that gas expands in the stomach and intestines, and barf-ola. He lost his entire dinner shortly after surfacing.

Not a legend, but a cute true story, anyway; related to the Pop Rocks legend...

We only use 10%, or less, of our brain.

This one bothers me because I hear it quite often.

Wait at least 45 minutes after you eat before you go swimming.

How many times have you heard that one?

Posted: May 30, 2008 2:36pm
Off route 280 in New Jersey there’s a story about an exit off ramp where a horrible car crash happened, everyone died including a little baby girl. If you come off this exit, and come down to the end of the ramp, at the stop sign, then put your car into neutral, it will roll backwards up the ramp. Spooky, weird and if I remember right, it really worked! But then, it was the seventies and maybe we were just very high? Either way, it's a popular story around these parts.

An in-city vortex effect, that's cool. I think there are many areas in the world where the landscape is such that it seems your car rolls uphill if placed in neutral. We have one in Oregon and people swear it's paranormal. Of course, people are never convinced by my mundane explanation of the effect, I guess reality is just too boring for some.

I love mystery spots/holes. One summer in college, a buddy and I drove all up and down the eastern seaboard trying to hit different magic roads we read about on the internet. The best by far was the gravity hill in Pennsylvania. Even knowing it was an illusion, it was just right that it felt like rolling uphill.

My fav with a magic twist is the "Gucci Kangaroo". Snopes has a few versions of it and it is the title of one of the early collections of urban legends in print.

Basically .. tourists to Australia go out driving in "the bush" and hit a big kangaroo with their car. The roo is there, sprawled across the road, so they first take a few close up photos and then decide it's an opportunity too good to miss. They prop the roo up against the front of the car and take some more shots with people standing next to it. Going one step further, they then drape a camera around it's neck, put cap on it's head and drape a jacket over it's back for a terrific fun photo. It's at this point that the stunned kangaroo becomes conscious again and bounds away into the bush with the expensive camera and jacket, containing wallets passport, car keys etc etc.

Now this story has been told in Australia since about 1900 and usually it's directed at visiting groups who need to be shown up a bit.
Retelling of the tale has included, English Cricketing team out here for the Test Series, Italian Sailing Team out for the Americas Cup Series (this is when it started being known as The Gucci Kangaroo ) and even the Rolling Stones.

So here's the Magic twist.

After Dai Vernon died, in a tribute article in Genii or Magic, Bruce Cervon told the story as if it had really happened to the Professor on his trip out here, as an example of the adventures he had had over his life. Now, I don't imagine in any way that Bruce told the story to show Vernon up. Presumably Dai had heard the story at some point and then retold it back home with himself as the hapless victim.)



Timothy

ps. if you look up Snopes, in the article is a transcript of Woody Allens "Moose" story, with a similar theme, which must rate as the most brilliantly crafted bit of comedy writing ever.
Not one superfluous word.

http://www.snopes.com/critters/malice/kangaroo.asp

Nice on MrHyde!
There is a similar one here where a hunter laid his rifle across a deer's antlers and the deer awoke a ran off with the gun.

Another.
A woman hunter shot a deer from a tree stand.
She left her gun on the stand, climbed down and tagged the buck.
Suddenly the buck gets up and runs.
Several shots are heard, the woman runs to the spot and sees another hunter ready to dress the buck.
She shouts, "Stop, that's my buck."
The hunter replies, "Are you nuts lady. You don't even have a gun."
"My tag is on the deer!", she says.
The man turns the deer over and sure enough there's her tag.
"I don't know how you did it lady but it's your kill."

One more.
Night after night a fellow heard scratching beneath his remote hunting cabin.
One day he noticed that it was a porcupine.
After several sleepless nights and several attempts to get rid of the creature he sees the animal by a pile of rocks a few yards from the cabin.
Thinking quickly, he sneaks up on the animal, pours gasoline on it and sets it afire.
The porcupine looking for refuge runs under the cabin which understandably burnt to the ground.

I don't know if you know this or not, But this is actually the plot in a movie that was made a few years ago. The movie was "Kangaroo Jack". Not the greatest movie ever made but pretty funny. In the beginning the same exact events that you describe above take place except its not a camera that the 'roo runs off with, Its like $40,000 that belongs to a mob boss stuffed in a red hoodie. The rest of the movie consists of the main characters trying to get the money back.

I didn't know that there was an actual story behind it.

Thanks for all the great story's everyone!! I'm having a blast reading them.

Tim