While some urban legends are only made to scare kids at sleepovers, some of them are true enough to scare even the bravest of people.
Check the back seat
Everyone’s heard the back-seat killer story. You know, the one where a woman’s driving at night and a stranger keeps flashing his headlights behind her, so she freaks out. But the stranger’s doing it because he sees someone hiding in her car.
Yes, the ending of the story is an urban legend, it’s entirely fictional, but there’s some truth to the first part. A murderer escaped prison in 1964 in New York City. Where did he go? Into the back seat of a car, a police detective’s car in fact, and the cop shot him.
Something came out of the tunnel
The legend of the Richmond, Virginia, vampire is pretty creepy. Apparently, after the Church Hill Tunnel collapsed, a creature covered in blood ran out, with jagged teeth and skin hanging from its body. It supposedly hid in Hollywood Cemetery.
Just a story, right? Actually, no, the tunnel really did cave in on October 2, 1925, and one of the men working on repairing it was fireman Benjamin F. Mosby. He crawled out badly scalded from the rubble and died that same night, starting the legend of the vampire.
Cold water, old tracks
Let’s get one thing straight, there aren’t hundreds of alligators living in the sewers, that’d just be unrealistic. But in 1935, some kids in East Harlem, New York, did see an alligator in the icy sewer.
Kids being kids, they pulled it out with a slipknot, totally safe thing to do, and they found that it was around 10 feet down in the sewer. The police later determined that it had probably come from the Everglades by boat and ended up inside the sewer.
A little extra in the bananas
Arachnophobes, watch out. One urban legend talks about someone finding a poisonous spider inside their groceries, and there was actually some truth to it. A family in South London found a Brazilian wandering spider in their banana delivery in 2014. It also had an egg sac.
Spiders do turn up in fruit shipments, not all the time so don’t worry, but it does happen. Most of them are completely harmless, though. You’re unlikely to find any black widows in your bananas.
No one was pretending
The baby in the oven story. There are so many versions of it that it’s hard to know which one to tell, but the main idea is that a babysitter who’s high on drugs accidentally puts the kids she’s sitting for in the oven. There are sadly some real cases linked to it.
19-month-old J’Zyra Thompson died in 2015 after being left with her only slightly older siblings. Her 3-year-old sibling put her in the oven, and another one turned it on, you don’t need to tell us to tell you the rest.
The radio warning had company
The story of the Hook is one that’s been told time and time again. A young couple, a lonely road, a radio warning, an escaped killer, all of it ends with a hook hanging from the car door. The hook part is thankfully not true. The rest of it? Maybe.
The 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders involved an unidentified attacker killing five people and wounding three others around Texarkana. Most of the victims were attacked in parked cars or quiet areas, nobody was ever convicted, though. Kind of makes it more terrifying.
Someone walked the same path
You might not have heard of the legend of Le Loyon, but most people in Switzerland have. It involves a person wearing a gas mask, cloak, and old military-style gear, walking around near Maules, Switzerland, freaking everyone out. It was real.
A witness actually took a photograph of Le Leyon in 2013, and locals said it walked around without attacking anyone. It later left its mask and cloak nearby, along with a written message saying it didn’t like the media attention because, apparently, even monsters get shy.
Still in the seat
Pawel Modzelewski was a man who didn’t get off a late-night London bus, nothing too strange, really, most people are half-asleep on the night bus. Except, he never got up. He’d died during the ride, and nobody had noticed for more than six hours.
It even went past the end of a shift before someone realized something was up. The story about the dead passenger on public transport was, unfortunately, very much real.
The room wasn’t empty
It’s not like Natalisi Taksisi was looking for a ghost in her Tokyo hotel room, she just noticed a weird smell. Then she looked under the bed and probably wished she hadn’t because she found a man hiding there.
Police later found a power bank and USB cable under the bed, too, because he’d been hiding out there. Let that be a lesson to thoroughly check your hotel room before you lie down, unless you want to be another example of the ‘stranger in the hotel room’ story being true.
Green had a secret
You’ve probably heard three, four, five different versions of the poisoned-dress story, all of them telling a tale about a secondhand dress that kills people who wear it. The real events are way worse because, well, the dress was fashionable.
Some bright green dyes used arsenic for coloring in the 1800s, people had no idea it was dangerous, and they wore it anyway. These dresses didn’t kill the owners immediately, obviously, but they sure were responsible for some untimely deaths.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.