I cringed while munching on Doritos at lunch the other day, remembering how grade school pals claimed the chips had bat guano in them. (What else could those little black specks be?) I then began to ponder the urban legends of my childhood, the ways they shaped my adolescent worldview and how darn entertaining some of them were. Here are three of my favorite tall tales; tell us yours after the cut!
1. The poison prom dress. This one really scared me for some reason, probably because I hit up Goodwill for my clothing from a young age. According to the tale, a poor girl buys a prom dress from a thrift store. She dons the gown for her big night, and is feeling beautiful and on top of the world…at first. But as the evening wears on, she starts to feel faint and exhausted. By the time the girl gets home, she collapses in her bed with the gown on, feeling too weak to take it off. Her parents find her dead the next morning, and later discover that the dress she was wearing was originally used as a funeral dress for a corpse. (And then I guess they randomly changed the dead woman for burial?) The formaldahyde from the body was absorbed by the dress, and it poisoned Prom Girl to death.
2. The hide-and-seek bride. A woman gets married at a huge mansion, and the wedding party decides to play hide-and-seek. Hours go by, and no one is able to find the bride. As days, weeks and months pass without sign of her, everyone assumes she got cold feet and fled her wedding. Until, years, later, her skeleton is found locked in a trunk in the mansion attic: the ultimate hide-and-seek spot.
3. The AIDS pinpricks. This one is certainly the most ridiculous, but I was in grade school when I heard it, and a 10-year-old will believe anything. A girl is sitting in a movie theater, and keeps feeling little pricks on her back. Thinking she’s just in an itchy chair, the girl ignores it. After the movie, she checks out her back in the mirror, only to discover it is covered in blood. And (this part makes me laugh so hard) spelled out in needle pricks on her back is “YOU NOW HAVE AIDS.” There are just too many inexplicable details here to even consider.
While most urban legends are simply absurd, I won’t deny that I still love surfing Snopes for extensive lengths of time. It’s always fun to not quite be sure if macabre and over-the-top tales are true.
What are your favorite urban legends?
guest
My favorite urban legends fall into the following:
1. Trust me.
2. The check is in the mail.
3. Let’s do lunch sometime.
guest
The one where the spider lays eggs in the girl’s face still freaks me out to this day. But me & my brothers used to read the one with the escaped prisoner & the hook on the car door over & over again. Loved that one lol.
guest
I definitely heard the aids pins before and checked my seat at the theater haha.
sunflower / 382 posts
Uh, lock yourself in the bathroom and say bloody mary out loud 3x.
SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME AND I WILL NEVER ATTEMPT IT NO MATTER WHAT.
guest
There are several creepy ones – Bloody Mary, the one about Black-Eyed Kids, Slenderman (which someone made up and admits to making up, yet people still believe it) and one called “Human’s lick too” which creeped me the FUCK out when I read it, haha.
guest
@iKevinL@xanga - That one used to scare me pretty badly! Now that I’ve seen the South Park episode where they make fun of that with Biggie Smalls, I can laugh about it, but I will still never stand in a dark bathroom and say Bloody Mary three times. No thanks. Just in case, you know. >.>
@daydreams_nightmares@xanga - If I didn’t have a daybed with a mattress taking up all the space under my bed as a child, I would’ve had issues with sleeping after reading “Humans lick too.”
guest
The hook one and bloody mary, like most people. lol. Won’t catch me in the bathroom doing that!
guest
@iKevinL@xanga - what happened when you did it? ive always been to scared to try that one >.<
guest
I thought those first 2 ones were real?.. Atleast Im pretty sure the one with the dress is.. Although I dont think it was a prom dress, just a regular dress?.. It was on this show where they show real reanactments or fake ones, but Im pretty sure that one was real?… I dont know.. lol…
I always heard of the Bloody Mary one, lol.
orchid / 119 posts
@daydreams_nightmares@xanga -
Ugh, humans can like too scared the bejesus out of me! Hahahah. There was also the “always check your back seat” because people can crawl in there and kill you dead when you’re driving.
My grandmother won’t drink out of pop cans now because she got the email about rat’s getting into warehouses and peeing on the cans, and you can die from rat urine. Bunch of baloney, but it got to her.
But really, I love Urban Legends. I loved watching the movies, too.
Does anyone remember that show from the 90′s? With the bugs at the diner telling creepy stories? Then always said, “it’s a true story… it happened to a friend of a friend of mine”. Always freaked me out!
sunflower / 382 posts
@blackspiders@xanga - I’ve heard too many horrible ‘stories’ about it that I can never laugh about it! >.
@zzzzzulavalle@xanga - Haha I’m too scared to try! No thanks!
guest
@bbanmen420@xanga - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_dress#American_urban_legends
http://www.snopes.com/weddings/horrors/hideseek.asp
Doesn’t sound like they are real, just horror tales.
guest
Ah, I love urban legends.
I always used to love going into the bathroom and doing the whole Bloody Mary thing.
guest
Haha I’ve never heard of those legends, but that definitely would’ve freaked me out as a kid. I used to watch this Urban Legends tv show and the ones that scared me the most were the more realistic legends. Like some guy is driving at night on a lonely road and he flashes his lights to signal that another car doesn’t have their lights on..but it ends up being some form of gang initiation and the car follows him home.
Okay maybe it’s a liiiiittle out there, but it still scared the crap out of me.