Since the dawn of time, people have loved a good spooky story. I don’t have the research to back up that claim, but I have to assume it’s true.
From campfire tales to sleepover fables told with flashlights held under our chins, our obsession with keeping ghost stories and urban legends alive has never waned.
And what better way to cement these stories in our minds than to immortalize them on the internet? Reddit user the2cousins posed this question to the AskReddit community: “What local urban legends did you have in your hometown when you were growing up?” And another user who has since deleted their account asked, What is your hometown’s creepy urban legend? BEWARE!!!! The answers are positively spine-tingling. Read at your own risk!
1. “In Pawleys Island, SC, there is a legend that ‘The Gray Man’ will appear on the beach before a hurricane and that whoever he appears to will have their home spared.”
2. “I live in San Antonio, TX, and we have the legend about the haunted train tracks. Some time ago, a school bus got stuck on some train tracks. The bus driver jumped out, but the kids got hit by the train. A lot of streets around the tracks are named after kids who supposedly died on the bus. But if you park about 10 or 20 feet away from the tracks and put your car in neutral, the kids’ ghosts push you across the tracks so you won’t get hit. Don’t forget to put baby powder on the back of your car so you can see their handprints. I went with my brother and girlfriend, and I was laughing, saying it wasn’t real, and the car stopped on the tracks. My brother told me I shouldn’t have been saying mean things.”
3. “In the Bahamas, there are blue holes (sinkhole-like caverns in the bottom of the ocean floor), and legend has it that mermaids live deep down in the caves. If an unlucky diver were to go too deep and find one, they pull you down and ask you a question: Do you want to eat fish for dinner? Or conch? If you answer fish, they hold you down in anger until you drown. And if they think you’re lying, they may drown you anyway. It’s one of those myths that was worth scaring children with. Annually, many divers get pulled by the currents in the blue holes and drown. They’re very unsafe for weak swimmers. But kids love jumping from the cliffs into them.”
—u/pirateOfTheCaribbean
4. “When I was in fourth or fifth grade, there were rumors that an older kid in my town had found a severed hand in a jar in the woods. I can’t remember an adult ever talking about it, but the consensus on the playground was that it was the work of a mysterious and violent motorcycle gang. It was a huge deal to the kids in the area, and I stopped playing in the woods as a direct result. I forgot all about it until high school when I learn that one of my friends, who lived through the woods in an adjoining neighborhood, had actually been the one to find the mythical hand.
5. “One of our streets was haunted. On a windy October after midnight, a teen couple parked on the side of the road. Their friends drove by at one point and saw them talking and listening to the radio. The next morning, their car was in the same spot but looked like it had been hit from all sides. And the kids were nowhere to be found. No trail of blood, no tracks, nothing. Completely disappeared. They say if you park where the kids were parked for seven minutes after midnight and tune to the same radio station they were listening to, you can hear the last minutes of their lives.”
—u/big_ander
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