People Are Sharing The Creepiest Urban Legends In Their Hometowns

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2 days ago

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."
— u/alwaysapirate
"If you see him, you know everything around your home and all your neighbors are fucked. Ever seen a picture of a house standing on a block of splintered debris after a hurricane? Now that's going to be your neighborhood. It's like a curse of Survivor's Guilt."—u/ZarquonsFlatTire
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."
—u/doc_moses
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.
"It made the whole thing seem even stranger. But still sort of dreamy and odd. Last chapter; kitty-corner across the street from my house was a dude who lived with his mom and drove around in a big ass car with a 'Have you hugged your funeral director today?' bumper sticker. Turns out, he actually was an assistant funeral director. He was cutting the hands off of some of his cadavers to remove their jewelry. The hands were stored in jars in his basement. Except for when he occasionally dumped the backlog in the woods behind his house."
—[deleted]
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
6."There's a church called the Water of Life church in Plano, TX, a suburb of Dallas. It has no real windows, and if you go there at night, there's always one or two cars parked in the entrance, and really spooky choir music is audible. The doors are all metal, and the 10-inch square windows on the doors have that shatter-proof wire mesh in them. Keep in mind that this church is not in a bad area. The rumor is that a woman walked into a nearby convenience store covered in blood, and said they tried to sacrifice her."
"There are mentions online of it being some kind of cult. A Google search reveals creepy videos from inside, mentions of the 'pastor' being a former televangelist fired for being a whack-job. Very weird. Another Redditor posted that a member of this church amputated her child's arms because 'God told her to.' This really seems like some fucked-up cult, operating in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. Scary shit, since I lived within a block of it back when I was a kid."
—u/AllanJH
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7."I lived near Statesboro, GA for a time, and there was a legend about the old abandoned slaughter house on the aptly named 'Slaughterhouse Road.' The slaughterhouse had been built sometime in the '20s, and operated through the mid-'40s before a fire ran through the place, killing a number of the employees. The legend was that the fire had been started by the owner when he found out his young bride-to-be wanted to break off the marriage in favor of her childhood sweetheart.
"Among the dead reported were the woman and the presumed sweetheart. The owner himself effectively vanished off the face of the earth after the fire, making the case technically (he'd be long dead now) still open. The building has long stood abandoned, with no power, phone, or access to the topmost floor. Yet this hasn't prevented phone calls to 911 cropping up from there, as well as strange sightings of a woman in the windows along the top floor where the offices were."
—u/Kabukikitsune
8."In Hawaii, we have many urban legends. My favorite is Pele, the fire goddess. At night, if you are driving and come across an old woman wearing white, you have to give her a ride, or bad luck will come your way. My dad was in his early 20s on the Big Island, driving through the Chain of Craters road, which, due to being in a national park, has almost no street lighting. With his friends, they came across an old woman in white. They let her in the backseat and drove back to the camp to drop her off. She got out, and when they turned around, she had disappeared. To this day, my dad SWEARS it was Pele."
—u/ldeponte
9."I'm from Leicester, MA, and we have the Spider Gate Cemetery, aka 'the eighth gate to hell.' So much shit goes on there. There's supposedly a satanic altar if you look for it, and a second cemetery that, if you find it once, you can never find it again. They say if you walk around Marmaduke's tombstone ten times, then rest your head on it and say 'speak to me,' he'll speak to you. They also say that if you pass through the main gate too many times, you'll be transported to hell. My sister and I spent a summer trying to find everything, but couldn't."
—u/harry_waters
10."I'm from Michigan, and we have this thing called 'The Melon Heads.' They say if you go down to this bridge and do a dance, these people with oblong heads will attack you."
—u/Bonifaz_Reinhard
"If anyone wants the full story, I've got you. I used to live on the same road as the 'melon heads' and took people down there all the time. There once was a man named Doctor Crow who lived with his wife in a house down Wisner Road. Doctor Crow experimented on kids with hydrocephalus (hence the large heads). He was a nice man trying to find a cure, but he had some questionable methods of experimentation. He kept the children in cages, and some experiments were seen as cruel or torturous. Mrs. Crow, on the other hand, was the nicest lady imaginable; she would feed and nurture these kids, basically like a second mother. One day, the husband and wife got into an argument, and Doctor Crow pushed his wife into a cabinet, and she split her head open and died. This caused the children to go crazy. The next time Doctor Crow opened up the cage, the children swarmed him and killed him. After they killed him, they ate him and discovered a love for human flesh. The children escaped and now live in the woods around Wisner/the Holden Arboretum. This is the story I've always been told."
—u/Might_Be_Novelty
11."In my hometown, there's a legend that one of our high schools is haunted by a girl who died by suicide in the school. There were reports of green ooze dripping from the ceiling, and the hallway was supposedly covered in fog every day. That fourth-floor hallway has been closed off for decades. Some hear a girl sobbing near the hallway, some see her waving at them from the balcony, and some even see a girl jump off the balcony but vanish before she hits the ground."
—u/SwegTestica7
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12."I live in Southern California, about half an hour east of the cities, in the foothills. It's very rural with lots of steep rocky hills and dry brush. We have a legend about the blue people, a cult that lives deep in the foothills. They never come out during the day, so their skin is super pale and tinted blue. They will leave one of their own lying on the road out in the rural areas, and when a car stops to help them, they'll surround the car, and that person and the vehicle will never be seen again. I once got lost with very little gas out in the foothills at night, and this story freaked me out so much I had to keep convincing myself it was just a story."
—u/snugginator
13."I grew up in Ohio. There's the legend of Tinker's Hollow. It's said that Old Mister Tinker, a miner, haunts the site. He can sometimes be seen riding his horse and buggy, and if you go under the bridge, you can sometimes hear his buggy pass overhead. It's said that you can see his green eyes glowing, and he'll lead you to his gold if you talk to him. Mr. Tinker was an alchemist. He made a special non-rusting metal that has never been duplicated. There are tombstones around town that were made with his Tinker's metal; they're pretty neat. Unlike anything you're used to seeing in a graveyard."
—u/jessika_anne
14."I'm from a suburb of Seattle. There's a myth that if you travel from Federal Way to Tacoma on foot or bike at night, you'll begin to notice that little things start to get weird. Usually, you'll feel as if you're just stuck in the same 500 foot stretch of land that just repeats over and over again forever. Then paranoia sets in. The last thing is that you start to see shadowy figures chasing you on foot. I thought it was stupid when I heard it in the seventh grade until I tried it. I noticed a few shadowy figures out of the corner of my eye looking at me, and at that point, I peeled out and drove to my girlfriend's in downtown Seattle. Would never try it again. I had an intense paranoia I couldn't get rid of and night terrors for days at a time."
—u/SoundersAcademy
15."In Wichita, there's a bridge, Theorosa's bridge. There are a few versions of the story, but most of them say there was once a woman who had a child, and she threw the baby off the bridge into the water to be rid of it. Full of grief and regret, she then jumps in after the baby and drowns herself. Supposedly, if you go to the bridge and yell loudly that you have her child, she will appear and drown you in the river."
—u/StephenHawkings_Legs
16."About 100 kilometers from my hometown, there is a First Nations reservation with elders who tell stories of the 'little people.' Basically, they are tiny people who used to live in the caves around the lake in the old days, and if you see them, it's very bad luck. My grandmother visited the caves back in the '90s and took some family pictures. In all of them, you can see ghostly-looking little people all over the background. She took around five photographs, and every single one of them strangely disappeared except for one, which shows a ghostly figure holding a baby and a drum."
—[deleted]
17."I have the perfect story! This is giving me chills as I remember it. In my hometown, there was this massive grassy area, a couple square miles. This area was also often very foggy, to the point where you'd find it hard to see far in front of you, meaning if you got lost in the fog, you'd just have to keep walking until you reached the edge. Kids at school would always tell ghost stories about the fields and the fog, and the horrible things that happened to the people who got lost in it. There were stories of people who got turned around and around and died in the cold and stories of terrible monsters in the fog. The whole grassy area was scary enough, and the stories made it scarier. As a consequence, most of us were too scared to go into the grassy area alone, or at night, and stayed away. I found out when I grew up that this area had real abductions in the past.
"Real, no shit, abductions of people. Obviously not from a supernatural being, but I find it wild that as kids, we knew nothing about the reality of it. The legends and ghost stories kept us away from a possibly dangerous area. I feel like this is something the adults started to keep kids from being abducted."
—u/staycalm_keepwarm
18."I've got one from Arlington, WA. There was a house on a busy stretch of highway, but the road ran through farmland, so the house was still very secluded. Growing up, a lot of different people had lived in this house, but they all left because of hardship that made them unable to afford it or a death in the house. Eventually, the house was left abandoned. Here's the creepy part. During the three years it was unoccupied, the rightmost upstairs light was on every night. Never a car in the driveway or a person in the yard day or night. My friends and I went to explore it one night, and as soon as we got to the door, the light went out. We promptly left. The year I left for college, somebody bought it, so I don't know what became of it."
—u/saxmodeman88
19."The wolfanannies (sometimes referred to as heebies) of Winston-Salem, NC, back in the '60s. Basically, some type of animal was draining the blood out of penned-up chickens and rabbits along a road called Ebert. It was all reported in the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel newspapers. We used to go out to this abandoned rock quarry at night where it was supposed to frequent, but we never saw it, which made me wonder if there was anything to it. Went to the public library in the mid-'70s and looked the stories up on microfiche, and there were probably 20 articles or so with interviews with witnesses, law enforcement, the whole deal. There's nothing on the internet about it, but it was a big deal back in the day."
—u/callmestupid
20."I grew up in the city with the famous Lindley Street haunting; the home was located 5-10 minutes away from me. The urban legend was that an innocent family experienced poltergeist activity, in addition to their family cat speaking like a drunken sailor, cursing in a perfectly articulated voice. I saw Lorraine Warren (a paranormal investigator) speak a number of times, and she always said the cat would talk to anyone who was near; it never shut up. There are a few policemen in my town who continue to swear they saw the cat speak. During the '70s and '80s, the urban legend was that if you went to the house, you would easily be able to see poltergeist activity occurring. However, since the house changed hands there have been no reports of activity, and the current owners respond as if they don't know what anyone is talking about when asked about the haunting."
—[deleted]
21."I grew up in San Bernardino, CA, and downtown, the major theater that puts on plays and whatnot is the Sturges family playhouse. It was built in the '20's, but it was originally a middle school. A fire burned everything except the theater, which they turned into the Playhouse. There's a legend that the ghost of a kid named Joshua (who died in a football accident when the school was still there) haunts the theater. People have heard voices and seen orbs of light, but the most common thing is to find the pictures in the room at the top of the stairs suddenly hanging askew. My brother and I had firsthand experiences with the ghost."
"I was helping my brother clean up after the run of a play he was in, and the director asked us to get a can of paint from the room at the top of the stairs. I, of course, really didn't want to, but my brother and I went anyway. The only people in the building were my brother and I, the director, and her wife, both of whom were at the opposite end of the building putting props into the back of their pickup truck. We get to the top of the stairs, and the door is locked. Now, this is a two-inch-thick solid oak door with knobby brass handles. My brother and I were wondering how to get into the room (because there is only one way in, through that door). The door makes a loud 'WHAM!!!' like someone on the other side got a running start and rammed their shoulder into it. Needless to say, we were scared shitless and got the director, who gets the keys and opens the door. NO ONE IS IN THE ROOM. EVEN CRAZIER, EVERY SINGLE PAINTING ON THE WALL WAS TILTED. There was no way anyone could have been in there, and especially no way anyone could have escaped."
—u/archeantus1988
And finally, a reminder to take all urban legends with a tiny (or gigantic) grain of salt:
22."There's a guy who rides his bicycle all over my town. People used to say that he had been arrested a bunch of times for assault and had maybe even murdered someone. I was so afraid of him growing up. As it turns out, he grew up in my town and came back to take care of his sick mother and just sort of lost a couple of screws after she passed. He's an incredibly kind man who does a lot of charity work for the town, but you know how kids talk. I like to think of him as the old man in Home Alone. Just goes to show everyone has a story, and isn't always what they seem."
—u/talbottron
Have you heard any of these urban legends before? Or have any of your own you'd like to share? Tell me in the comments!
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
If you love spooky stories, you'll love the upcoming horror film The Ritual! Based on the true notes and findings of a real-life exorcist and the multiple exorcisms of Emma Schmidt (aka Anna Ecklund), it's sure to horrify you. Check out the trailer here:
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