Blogtober Day 26: Top 5 Urban Legends

Nothing says Halloween like sinister stories that have pervaded our cultural psyche, and there are few that have captured the minds of the masses as much as these five urban legends. Are they just old wives’ tales or is there truly something spooky going on?

1. Killer in the Backseat

This classic urban legend goes a little something like this, imagine you’re driving alone at night on a quiet road when a truck comes flying up behind you, flashing their full beam and indicating for you to pull over. You think there’s no way you’re stopping until you’re safely home but the driver keeps on following you. It’s only when you make it home that you discover the other driver was trying to get your attention because a murderer had snuck onto your backseat. I’ll be honest, this is actually the one on this list that does make me shudder. I have no idea where I first heard this story but it’s clearly got in my head as I genuinely do check my backseat every time I drive anywhere on my own.

2. Bloody Mary

Who hasn’t heard of Bloody Mary?! If you’re not familiar with this particular urban legend, the gist is you go into your bathroom, light some candles and say “Bloody Mary” thirteen times (I think sometimes you have to spin around when you say it but why that would help, I don’t know) and then she is said to appear in your bathroom mirror. What happens then really varies according to different sources on the internet, some versions of the Bloody Mary legend are really brutal, some surprisingly tame.

3. Black-eyed Children

This one is pretty bizarre. Throughout the world there have reports of children with black eyes knocking on people’s doors and asking to go inside their home or car. The key thing here is that no matter what reason they give, you shouldn’t let them instead otherwise something bad will happen. It’s certainly a spooky story and if you want to find out more about them, there are countless tales of allegedly true accounts of Black-eyed Children online.

4. Men in Black

It’s more than a Will Smith movie, the urban legend of the Men in Black goes back several decades. Conspiracy theorists and urban legend fans claim that the Men in Black are either agents from a top-secret strand of the FBI or some kind of alien race. They are said to be men in suits and dark glasses who silence anyone who claims to have seen aliens or UFOs.

5. Phantom Hitchhiker

I feel like this one is more of an odd phenomenon than a full-blown urban legend but I find it intriguing so I wanted to include it in this list. It’s a pretty straight forward myth, a driver picks up a hitchhiker who ends up disappearing at some point along the journey. In the UK, there is a road called the A229 where a fatal road collision occurred in 1965 near the Lower Bell Pub on Blue Bell Hill. Since then, there have been numerous claims of a woman in a white dress hitchhiking along the road only to disappear before she reaches her destination. It’s this classic phantom hitchhiker case that has led to the A229 being named one of the UK’s most haunted roads.

Spooky stuff but what do you make of it? Are you an urban legend fan or are you a total skeptic? Let me know in the comments!