URBAN LEGENDS AND CREEPY ENCOUNTERS
What makes an urban legend different from a typical ghostly encounter or notorious haunting? Sometimes, the lines between the two are blurred, and an urban legend is a ghost or monster story that has, at its core, a nugget of truth or reality. But when stacked with embellishment upon embellishment, many true stories turn into fantastical tales that are often hard to believe, and yet, many people swear they do believe.
The term “urban legend” is a type of folklore that was first brought into the public eye in 1981 courtesy of Professor Jan Harold Brunvand, who used it in his popular books that collect legends from various cultures and examine their origins and key compelling features. Today, with the ability of the Internet and social networks to turn a story viral in a matter of seconds, urban legends (and yes, they include rural stories, too) spread like wildfire and in the process take on new story characteristics and adjustments that were nowhere close to the original. Folklorists love to examine urban legends to try to find that original nugget of truth, describing these outlandish stories as modern myths, yet even ancient myths had truths to tell. They just veiled them in story symbolism.
Urban legends are the darlings of the entertainment industry because of their shock value and sensationalism. And they’re just plain scary as hell. Think of the many movies and television shows based on urban legends from Bloody Mary to the “fakelore” of the Rake and Slender Man—entities that, though purely fictional and a part of “creepypasta” (the term means “copy and pasted”) horror-related legends created by the public and made viral via the Internet, took on a reality in terrifying ways and were reported by people claiming they really existed. Slender Man, a child-targeting entity created in 2009 as a purely fictional entry in the Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday competition, took on such a life that in 2014, a young girl was stabbed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, by two other female friends who claimed Slender Man, was responsible.
Urban legends are said to take on many of the cultural and societal aspects of their times such as the many stories of vanishing hitchhikers and motorcyclists that pervaded the twentieth century, the stories of people being kidnapped and having a vital organ stolen that permeate our culture today in the age of modern medicine, and the even more recent fears of masked home invaders or faceless entities who may or may not be human. In this way, they are similar to mythology and are more of a cultural phenomenon than people might believe.
There are specific reasons why urban legends go viral so quickly. Today, with texting, email, and social networking on the Internet, our modern folklore gets spread faster than ever and almost behaves like a virus. There is a scientific basis for this, as reported in the British Journal of Psychology. A Durham University study conducted by Joe Stubbersfield, Jamie Tehrani, and Emma Flynn examined the idea that an urban legend’s success could be explained by the way human brains evolved to learn, remember, and transmit specific types of information more readily than others. Our brains evolved to notice and remember information important to our survival (remember the Reticular Activating System discussed in the first chapter of this book?), and we then evolved a greater level of intelligence to keep track of our social interactions and relationships. Their hypothesis suggested that we evolved to be disposed to social and survival-based information—both very important to us—which left us susceptible to notice, remember, and then pass on stories that contain this information, even if they are not based in reality.
Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah, popularized the term “urban legend” in his books on American culture.
The study involved giving participants an urban legend with both social and survival information and had them read and then write down the stories from their memory. Their stories, written from recall, were then handed to the next participant, who then read them and wrote them down on another sheet of paper from their memory, and so on and so on. This is a process similar to the game “Operator,” in which a line of people pass a sentence down until the last person, who then repeats it to find it has somewhat changed from the original. These studies and others showed that people were attracted to stories with survival threats or social relationships and were likely to pass those stories on to another person. If the story contained both survival threats and social information or just survival information, it was not passed as quickly or with as much memory retention as those stories that only had social information, proving that although both are important to humans, those legends with strong social information are remembered longer and with more detail. This seems to apply to folklore, myth, and even novels. Those that focus on social interactions stick with us longer!
Every country on Earth has its urban legends. This book will focus on the United States, but not every urban legend will be presented here because for every state, every city, and every small town, there is one or several (check around because surely your town does, too!). There are far too many to mention in one book, let alone six or seven. In fact, the author of this book grew up with an urban legend that she later found out was true: the tale of Shotgun Annie.
Growing up in Garnerville, New York, back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the tiny town along the Hudson River, just north of Nyack in Rockland County, had an urban legend called “The Old Lady’s Field,” which was also known to locals as “Shotgun Annie’s Field.” Kids who lived on Captain Shankey Drive and Barnes Drive used to cut across the field to get to Red’s, the local candy store where you could buy five pieces of sugary, cavity-causing goodness for a quarter. Not cutting across the field meant a long walk down, then back up, Captain Shankey Drive, so it was only natural to seek out a great shortcut.
Well, legend had it that the field was owned by a wicked, old witch named Annie, who had a shotgun and huge killer dogs (Dobermans come to mind), and she would shoot at kids trying to cross her field! She lived in a huge, white house that bordered the main road across the field. No one dared go trick or treating there for Halloween. Yes, we crossed that field a few times, but we ran like we had fire on our heels, stayed close to the side opposite her house and never tried this at night (although one particularly horrific Halloween night does come vaguely to mind when long-standing rules were broken). Rest assured, it was terrifying, despite never being shot at or having huge dogs race across the grass to rip our throats out!
In 1974, my family moved across the country to California, and the Old Lady’s Field became one of those fun things we told new friends and family. Decades later, in a Facebook group for people who grew up in the town of Garnerville, other residents who lived there around the same time confirmed the legend of Shotgun Annie was, indeed, true because several locals reported having had encounters with the old gal herself, along with her shotgun! Sadly, that field was later turned into condominiums and Annie, well, who knows what happened to her? The legend persists to this day, and those of us who lived it pass it on to our children and grandchildren.
Urban legends are so popular today that they’ve spawned a new kind of travel/tourist phenomenon called legend tripping, where people travel to sites known for their urban legends, monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural shenanigans. This can include everything from abandoned buildings; deserted train stations; haunted roadways, waterways, and tunnels; creepy caves; and anywhere else that is surrounded in paranormal mystique. Legend-tripping pilgrimages are usually made in groups, but some brave souls dare go alone only to return with even more far-out tales of supernatural circumstances that then get added on to the original legend they were chasing in the first place.
That’s how urban legends work. There is a seed of truth, upon which leaves, buds, and flowers are attached and embellished into a most incredulous story that is hard to swallow. Just don’t tell that to Shotgun Annie, wherever her ghost may roam today. So, as you read the following urban legends, keep in the back of your mind that there is embedded within a grain of truth—a real story of a real person, place, or event and, like mythology, folk stories, tall tales, and parables, it is up to us today to attempt to figure out what that is.
THE MURDERED PEDDLER
We begin with an urban legend that spawned an entire spiritual field of study. In the 1840s, Mr. and Mrs. Bell of Hydesville, New York, had a visitor, a young peddler who came to shop his wares. The Bells’ housekeeper invited the young man in, and he stayed in the house for several days. During that time, the housekeeper was dismissed, but then a week later, she was rehired. The young peddler was no longer at the Bells’ home, but many of the items he was peddling were being used in the Bells’ kitchen.
The Fox sisters (left to right are Margaret, Kate, and Leah) became the first celebrity mediums in America back in the 1840s.
She imagined the Bell family bought the items from the man, then he must have left and moved on, only she began experiencing visions of a ghost—namely, the peddler’s ghost, who informed her that while she had been no longer working at the home, the Bells murdered him! His body was found in the home, though no record of his identity was ever found. This story was originally told by two sisters, Maggie and Katie Fox, who claimed in March 1848 they communicated with the dead peddler through rapping noises in front of many witnesses, only to later admit the whole thing had been faked. They recanted their story immediately afterward. The Fox sisters became the first celebrity mediums, setting the stage for the founding of a new religion called Spiritualism, which grew in size and popularity from the 1840s to the 1920s. The Fox sisters gained notoriety and were introduced to others interested in contacting the dead.
LOCAL URBAN LEGENDS
Indiana is home to the Blue River, the site of a local urban legend involving a headless ghost. According to the legend, a teenage girl was beheaded years ago when she was on the river paddling in her canoe. She was paddling so fast, she never saw the fishing line someone had tied across the expanse of the river and off went her head, severed by the fishing line at the neck. Locals say you can sometimes see her ghost body at night wandering the river banks seeking her head by the light of the full moon.
In Bowie, Maryland, locals swear that a creature called the Goat Man wanders the backroads attacking cars with an axe. Fletchertown Road seems to be the favorite spot of this half-goat/half-human monstrosity many believe is really a former scientist who worked at the nearby Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. He was experimenting with goats when it backfired, and he was exposed to mutations that caused him to form goatlike features. With an axe as his weapon of choice, he began roaming the rural roads near the facility when he wasn’t living in the woods alone as a hermit. Another theory states the Goat Man is the Devil himself and that the urban legend was kept alive by bored teenagers who kept repeating the story and making up attacks against lovers locked in an embrace at the local Lover’s Lane. Whatever the origins, in 1971, a dog was killed, and some attributed the death to the Goat Man, proving that urban legends can become real in the minds and imaginations of people just as easily as factual reports.
California’s Ojai Valley is home to an urban legend surrounding the Camp Comfort Country Park. This is the home of the mysterious Char-Man, the spirit of a horribly disfigured man who was burned in a wildfire back in 1948. The legend states the man and his son were trapped by the fire and when rescue workers found them, the son was alive and fled into the forest. It was revealed the son had strapped his father to a tree and pulled off his skin, leaving him to burn alive. Yet another story claims the Char-Man was a married man who went insane when he was trapped by the fire and unable to help his screaming wife. Regardless of who he is, if you drive onto the bridge in the park at night and get out of your car, the Char-Man will charge at you and attack you to try to rip off your skin.
Out in the California desert is the famous Salton Sea, the largest lake in the state, which attracts many annual visitors to see the shallow, saline, endorheic rift lake that sits directly above the notorious San Andreas Fault line. It is situated in the Sonoran Desert in the southeastern corner of California and includes the Salton Sea State Recreation Area and the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. It may also include some ghosts. Visitors report all kinds of bizarre activity around this mysterious, isolated locale, including strange humanoid creatures that roam about, victims of radiation poisoning from years of top-secret nuclear testing in the area decades ago. This same theory posits that all wildlife in the area was poisoned as well and that the ghosts of many humans and animals who died there haunt the area. There are many reports of UFOs and strange lights in the sky at night hovering over the lake, and these extraterrestrials may have even had a hand in creating the lake! This was once a thriving resort area in the 1950s and 1960s when Bombay Beach was filled with hotels, homes, schools, and yacht clubs. Now it looks more like a great place to film a movie about the apocalypse. Green sludge and fish skeletons cover beaches once filled with suntanned vacationers. Whatever the truth may be, locals insist visitors should not go there at night.
Built in the thirteenth century, Houska Castle near Prague, Czech Republic, is, according to legend, literally harboring a gateway to hell.
Jump across the Atlantic to Scotland’s infamous Ghost Road, a stretch of rural road marked A75 Kinmount Straight, where drivers are said to encounter everything from strange animals, people running into the road only to vanish before your eyes, a man on crutches who has no eyes, and all sorts of other bizarre activity that serves to terrify those who dare to drive the tree-lined road.
Another haunted forest is in Romania. The Hoia Baciu Forest is the site of many a legend of bizarre creatures, ghosts, phantom laughter and voices, UFO sightings, red balls of light, and people being scratched by unseen hands. Considered one of the most haunted forests in the world, hundreds of people have gone missing here, never to be heard from again. There is even a clearing in the forest where any life refuses to grow, prompting the locals to suggest it may be a portal to another dimension or even hell itself.
Speaking of gateways to hell, Prague’s Houska Castle is said to have been built for that purpose or, at least, according to urban legend, to close the gates of hell. Located deep in the forest, the castle was alleged to have been built upon a bottomless pit from which demons entered this world. In the 1930s, Nazis conducted occult experiments at the castle, only they didn’t go so well. Years later, during an excavation, the skeletons of many Nazi officers turned up. They had been killed execution style. The castle has been haunted over the years by strange hordes of frogs, a headless, black horse, the ghost of a bulldog, and the usual human apparitions.
Avoid the woodsy backroads of Holland, Michigan, where deformed feral children are said to roam, running out into the street and terrifying drivers. Locals believe these children may be former patients of a local asylum that was shut down in the 1970s and was home to children suffering from a disease called hydrocephalus, which enlarges the forehead.
Some urban legends are more bittersweet, including the legend of the Man in Gray. The residents of Pawley Island in South Carolina talk of a man in gray that goes around warning people of a coming storm or hurricane. He is said to be the ghost of a young man who was coming to town from Charleston to see his beloved when his horse was caught in pluff mud in the marshes. The horse and the young man drowned in the quicksand-like mud, and now, his spirit haunts the shore nearby, warning others of the dangers of the area and oncoming storms and seeking his beloved. The Man in Gray, also known as the Gray Man, became even more famous after Hurricane Hugo when the television show Unsolved Mysteries interviewed island residents who claimed they had encountered the Gray Man on the beach before a major storm. He was dressed in a long, gray coat and looked a bit like a pirate. After the storm had passed, they noticed that those who had not seen the Gray Man had had their houses destroyed, but the homes of those who saw him had been spared by Mother Nature.
Speaking of water, in Devil’s Hopyard State Park in East Haddam, Connecticut, locals report seeing the Devil himself sitting atop Chapman Falls, a 60-foot (18-meter), cascading waterfall. The Devil likes to sit on the largest boulder at the top of the falls playing a violin while his demon army makes poisonous brews down below in the potholes at the bottom of the falls. Some locals even say you can see burn marks on the rocks around the potholes made by the Devil’s hooves.
Many urban legends, such as the Devil playing the violin above, sound like they have ancient pagan influences. The nature god Pan was often portrayed as playing a violin. Another pagan-influenced urban legend is that of the Green Man, said to be a former employee of a local power company near Piney Fork, outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Legend has it the Green Man was horribly disfigured in an accident at the power plant. His face melted, and his skin took on a deep green hue. Those unlucky enough to see his ghost report his skin appears to glow as he walks down rural roadways and disappears in the Piney Fork Tunnel. The tunnel, which was built in 1924, became known as the Green Man Tunnel after teenagers reported driving into the tunnel at night, turning off their car headlights, and calling out the Green Man’s name, at which time he would appear out of the darkness. If he touched anyone, they would feel a strong electrical charge, and if he touched a vehicle, the engine would stall and fail to restart. The Green Man is also called Charlie No-Face by locals who claim he is merely a horribly disfigured, mortal man who happens to be able to blow cigarette smoke out of holes in his cheeks. Getting closer to the truth behind the legend, the Green Man (aka Charlie No-Face) may indeed be a real person—one Raymond Robertson, who died in June 1985. As a child, Robertson was horribly disfigured in an electrical accident on the Morado Bridge electrical lines. Unable to go to public school, he could be seen walking the roads at night alone using a walking stick to help guide him. He was struck many times by cars, and those who stopped to talk to him described him as friendly, although that didn’t stop the urban legend of the Green Man from growing and spreading to future generations.
Famous author Ambrose Bierce based his story “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” on an Alabama urban legend.
Miltonsburg, Ohio, is home to a man whom locals don’t quite know if he is alive or dead or somewhere in between. This urban legend goes back to the late 1700s when a local farmer named Mr. Kaiser was murdered when someone broke into his farmhouse. The local sheriff of the small town banded together with sheriffs in other nearby towns to try to find the cold-blooded killer but to no avail. On the one-year anniversary of Mr. Kaiser’s still unsolved murder, a stranger walked into the town’s saloon, shocking the bartender, who said the man looked exactly like Mr. Kaiser. He asked the man if he was Mr. Kaiser’s brother or father, but the man just stood there and in front of the bar patrons said he was Mr. Kaiser and that he had never been gone! The man then vanished before their eyes, but locals have since then reported seeing his ghost roaming around, seeking the murderer who took his life.
Another “missing person” urban legend comes from Alabama. In July 1854, a farmer named Orion Williamson (as one version of the legend has it) was walking on his farm near Selma, Alabama. His wife and kids were sitting on the porch, and neighbors saw him walking and made sure to wave hello. Williamson waved back, but then he vanished into thin air! His family and neighbors rushed to where he last stood, but there was no sign of him. A huge search party was formed, and they combed the fields deep into the night but to no avail. The search continued for days with people coming in to help or be looky-loos, having heard about the story via word of mouth. One visitor was a journalist named Ambrose Bierce, who ended up writing about the spooky case in “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.” The legend claims Williamson’s wife and son could hear his voice calling to them for help but that as the weeks went by, the voice grew fainter and fainter until it ceased altogether. Was he trapped in an alternate universe? He fell through a wormhole into another world right on his own land!
Urban legends often involve strange animals called cryptids. These are cryptozoological beasts such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Dogmen—yes, Dogmen. Some researchers believe these are actual animals, and others suggest they may be interdimensional beings that cross over their world into ours. The Dogmen have been reported for hundreds of years. In the small town of Norton, Ohio, hunters have reported spotting these bipedal dog beasts at night. They are said to stand between seven and nine feet tall when on their hind legs, and they often have red, glowing eyes that pierce the night. They usually travel in groups of two or three and live deep within the forest. Because they don’t seek out human contact, they are usually only spotted by humans who happen to be traveling along rural roads or in the backwoods. One such encounter occurred in the Silver Creek Metro Park along the woodsy Chippewa Loop Trail. Two hunters spotted deer running across Johnson Road but then saw what the deer were frantically running from.
Dogmen are muscular, fast, and usually dark in color. Unlike Bigfoot, which has also been spotted in the same area of Ohio, these beasts did not swing their arms when they ran and had doglike heads. The Dogmen occasionally are white in color or black with silver or white markings; they are like wolves, only those who have encountered them know for a fact they are not wolves. There have been so many sightings all over the country of Dogmen, and this urban legend has spawned a number of horror movies of attacks by giant, doglike creatures that tower over humans.
Witnesses often hear the Dogmen’s awful howls before they see them. Sometimes the creatures are just walking about the backyards or on driveways, but other witnesses report a sense of dread when they are nearby. Writer/researcher Linda Godfrey documented Dogmen sightings, including one near Norton, Ohio, in her book Real Wolfmen. Could they be wolves? If you ask those who have seen them, they are liable to ask if you’ve ever seen a seven-foot-tall wolf running on its hind legs!
Another howler of an urban legend is found in the Ozark Mountains and surrounding areas in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. The aptly named Ozark Howler is another dogbeast that witnesses claim is the size of a bear with horns, a muscular build, stocky legs, shaggy hair, and a howl that sounds like a cross between a wolf and the bugle of an elk. The creature may have been a misidentified large cat, according to some anthropologists, and it may be a hoax perpetrated by a local college student who made a bet with friends that he could fool cryptozoologists who study strange creatures.
Down near Newport, Arkansas, another cryptid roams the White River named, appropriately, the White River Monster. Since 1915, people have reported seeing this beast in the river, nicknaming it “Whitey” and turning it into a local urban legend. Whitey is said to be gray in color and the length of three cars. There have been numerous attempts to catch Whitey but to no avail. In the 1970s, people reported seeing a gray creature with a horn on its head and a spiny back twenty feet long. Locals claimed to have seen three-toed, fourteen-inch footprints near the river bed as well as crushed brush and broken tree branches that looked as though something large moved through the area.
The area became the White River Monster Refuge in 1973 thanks to a bill signed into law by state senator Robert Harvey making it illegal to harm the creature. Though sightings tapered off recently, the locals still wonder if Whitey exists or is just a normal giant fish that unwittingly became a legend.
COMMON URBAN LEGENDS
Some mysterious sightings involve the same type of urban legend seen in a variety of areas. One example is the mysterious vanishing hitchhiker, which has been reported all over the country as a strange man, or woman, seen hitchhiking on the side of a road—sometimes a rural road, sometimes not. When the hitchhiker is picked up, he or she either vanishes upon entering the car or rides along for a while, still and silent, until let out of the car. Then, he or she vanishes. In some cases, the hitchhiker might be a child claiming to be lost and asking to be taken home, but when the driver arrives to the house, they ring the doorbell to find that the child that was standing next to them has vanished into thin air, and they are informed the child died years earlier.
A common urban legend is that of the mysterious hitchhiker who is picked up by a kind driver only to disappear once they enter the car.
Another hugely popular urban legend involves some type of ghostly Lady in White seen floating in the woods near a waterway or across a lonely road. She is usually crying and does not speak or acknowledge your presence. Caught in some kind of time loop, she repeats her tragic walk night after night, never seeming to quite find what she is looking for. She appears all over the world and sometimes dons a blood-soaked dress or gown, always white, suggesting murder or some other tragedy. Other times, she stands at the shore’s edge, looking out to the water as if waiting for a loved one to come back to her. The Lady in White has become nothing short of a ghostly icon!
Then there is Bloody Mary, another iconic ghost woman who appears in mirrors to people all over the world who dare repeat her name three times. Children love to invoke Bloody Mary, standing in front of the mirror with their eyes closed as they chant her name. Sometimes, she appears as a woman with long, stringy, black hair, covered in blood. Other times, she is the image of Queen Mary I, who was said to be a bloody ruler and child murderer. Others report seeing one of the queen’s innocent, young victims in the mirror. This enduring urban legend is a favorite for sleepovers and spooky séances, yet again shows how a global legend can have the same roots but different accoutrements depending on the location and culture. Yet, one thing remains the same no matter where you are—her name must be said three times with eyes closed, and when you open them, who knows which version of Bloody Mary you will see!
These types of entities appear everywhere and are usually tied to a local place or event, yet because of their universal nature, one has to wonder if there is more to the story behind these urban legends. Are they a part of our collective consciousness, manifesting all over the globe but with a few minor cultural differences? And if so, what do they mean?
One urban legend that does have a home is the Bell Witch, which refers to the Bell family in 1817. The John Bell family experienced a host of ghostly phenomena at their Adams, Tennessee, farm, including objects moving around, flying furniture, mysterious noises, and terrified animals, which they claimed was because of an alleged witch named Kate Batts. Kate was a neighbor to the Bell family who swore she would haunt Bell and his descendants after he cheated her in a land purchase. She made good on her promise and tormented the family after her death, after which she became known as the Bell Witch, although, ironically, the Bell family home activity was later ascribed to the young daughter, Betsy. But who cares about fact when creating an urban legend, and the Bell Witch story took off and became the inspiration for a number of popular modern movies, including The Blair Witch Project. After her death, it seemed that any bad luck that occurred to any member of the family was attributed to the Bell Witch. As her legend grew, she became more witch than human in origin and took on a decidedly evil, violent nature, which is the main reason for her popularity today in movies and paranormal television shows.
The Bell Witch even had her own cave on the property, and in 1817, there was a smattering of reports of bizarre animals near the cave and outside the house. The youngest Bell daughter, Betsy, was attacked by unseen forces, resulting in scratches, hair tugging, even physical beatings. The activity stopped when John Bell died in 1820 and Betsy called off her engagement. Today, those who take advantage of the tours of the home and the cave claim they can hear an old woman whispering in the dark, phantom hands that pull hair and even choke, and the sounds of laughing and moaning.
An artist’s drawing of Betsy Bell, the youngest Bell daughter who was attacked by the Bell Witch back in the early 1800s.
If the Bell Witch cursing a family of farmers doesn’t make you believe in the power of spells, the story of Rehmeyer’s Hollow will. Locals call this Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, home the “Hex House,” as it was once the home of a man named Nelson Rehmeyer, who was a Pennsylvania Dutch Powwow doctor or medicine man. He performed faith healings and witchcraft learned from his German roots, and he also may have practiced curses. Rehmeyer was the victim of another local witch, John H. Blymire, who believed Rehmeyer cursed him with bad health. Two teenager intruders who were friends of Blymire’s beat Rehmeyer to death and set his house on fire to hide the body and other evidence of their crimes, but the house did not burn down. All three men were put on trial and charged with the arson and murder. The house became a favorite haunted hot spot for legend trippers and still stands today on Rehmeyer’s Hollow Road.
FRESNO’S FAMOUS NIGHTCRAWLERS
Back in the 1990s, the Odyssey Online reported sightings of a strange type of creature that was captured on an anonymous homeowner’s outdoor surveillance video in southern Fresno, California. The man and his family were trying to get video of neighborhood dogs that were always trespassing on their property. Instead, they got video of two pale, extremely long-legged things with small heads striding across their lawn. In 2011, the same creatures showed up on security video at Yosemite National Park. The park had set up cameras to identify vandals and thieves who were destroying public property.
A local Native American tribe knew of the entities, claiming they’ve been walking around for centuries, and other tribes even had wood carvings of similar creatures. Theories include aliens, interdimensional entities, and cryptids, and some people claim the nightcrawlers were nothing but a hoax, except that sightings keep popping up. The SyFy Channel did an analysis of the original Fresno video for their Fact or Faked show and deemed it genuine and unaltered. Neither the family nor the police who investigated the initial sighting could figure out what they were seeing except that they were certainly not seeing humans. The family chose to remain anonymous, but the case made the news and took off like wildfire.
Because the entities are so strangely shaped and move so awkwardly, many people believe they are not of this world but have no fear of the creatures. They seem benign, never bother anyone, and for some reason like the areas around Fresno and Yosemite but could be more numerous than we think and exist in places they have not yet been spotted in. There have been no recent video captures of the entities. They caught on and avoid cameras, or they did their tourist thing here on earthly soil and vanished back into the place they came from … wherever that may be.
WALKING SAM
South Dakota saw a wave of 103 suicide attempts up to December 2014 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, all of which were attributed to the influence of a shadowy entity called Walking Sam. Teenagers on the reservation claimed to see a slender, shadowy man appear out of nowhere and command them to take their own lives. The first wave occurred in 2013 and resulted in five Oglala Sioux killing themselves. The situation got so bad, Tribal Vice President Thomas Poor Bear found photos on Facebook showing nooses hanging from trees and the plans behind a mass teenage suicide. The entity has been around a long time among Lakota Sioux and Dakota Native American tribes. Known as Stovepipe Hat Bigfoot or Taku-he, he has appeared to tribes as far back as 1974. Walking Sam may have its roots in the same origins as the Slender Man phenomenon from folklore and modern retellings of old legends that include a regional boogeyman.
DUDLEYTOWN’S DARK VORTEX
This Connecticut town is cursed according to many residents, who place the origin of the curse on the ill-fated Dudley family in England. Edmund Dudley suffered beheading for conspiring against King Henry VII. The curse was directed at the Dudley descendants who emigrated from England to Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1748 and helped establish a thriving iron industry. But when some untimely disasters and accidents befell the family, including strange deaths, insanity, and even suicide (some family members ran off into the woods never to be seen again), it was suggested they had brought a curse with them across the ocean. The residents then left the town, and it was abandoned except for the unusual phenomena reported in the area, including sinister wolfen creatures, floating balls of light, disembodied voices, and a bizarre lack of birds and other wildlife in the heavily forested area. There is even a rumor that the ghostly town is guarded by a mysterious, policelike group called The Dark Forest Association, and they are not too kind to trespassers.
BLACK-EYED GIRL
In 1967, seven-year-old Christine Darby was kidnapped from her home in Cannock Chase, England. The kidnapper was a man named Raymond Morris, who repeatedly raped the girl and then killed her, burying her body in a ditch. A year later, authorities discovered the body and arrested Morris, who was convicted of her murder and became suspect number one for other disappearances in the area involving girls Christine’s age.
A financial minister, speaker of the House of Commons, and president of the King’s Council during the reign of England’s King Henry VII, Edmund Dudley (at right, shown with King Henry VII [center] and minister Sir Richard Empson) was executed for treason, initiating a curse passed on to his descendants even as they fled to Connecticut.
Years later, people in the town began reporting a black-eyed girl wandering the Cannock Chase countryside. Locals believe it is Christine, claiming she was blindfolded during her captivity and it caused her eyes to turn black.
THE BERKLEY SQUARE HORROR
Another spooky tale from England happened at the location of 50 Berkeley Square in London and involves monsters. In the 1840s, twenty-year-old Sir Robert Warboys accepted a dare and spent the night in a haunted house with only a gun and candle inside. A guard was stationed outside the house. Late at night, the guard heard shouting and a gunshot. He rushed to Warboys’s room on the second floor and found the young man dead. Warboys had allegedly died of fright.
In 1887, two sailors named Edward Blunden and Robert Martin needed a place to stay on Christmas Eve. They stayed in the house at 50 Berkeley Square, which was empty at the time. During the night, Martin heard the sound of Blunden being attacked by something and saw a horrifying, brown form strangling Blunden to death. It had tentacle-like arms and legs and looked as though it came up from the London sewer system. It was clearly not a ghost or human.
Martin ran and got a local police officer to return with him. Blunden’s body had been thrown out of the second-story window and lay on the ground, crushed.
Today, the house is empty on the second floor, but the first floor is home to an antiquarian bookstore. On police orders, no one is permitted to go to the second floor. Bookstore employees and guests report hearing a host of strange noises above them.
DOG BOY
On Mulberry Street in tiny Quitman, Arkansas, there is a massive half-human, half-beast that chases people down the street biting at their heels like a dog. Only this “dog” looks like he weighs in at over three hundred pounds. This dog boy was a real person, namely Gerald Bettis, the son of the Bettis family, who lived on the street. Rumor has it, Gerald, a budding psychopath, would torture animals for fun, and eventually, he began torturing his elderly parents, locking them inside the home and possibly even murdering his own father. Gerald was later sent to jail for growing pot before it was legal and died in 1988 of a drug overdose. Either he is still haunting the street he called home or the Dog Boy is indeed some modern mutant animal living in the forest. Either possibility is quite horrifying to imagine and another example of an urban legend with a nugget of truth at its core.
Many urban legends start out happening in one or two locations, then go viral like bad memes on social networking. It then becomes hard to separate the fact from the fiction. One such example is the “Dead Body under the Bed” urban legend of a couple checking into a motel or hotel only to find a foul odor coming from under the bed at night. They get up and look and, lo and behold, find a dead body of some murder victim that was, for some strange reason, never spotted by the maid service before. Yet, there are actual claims of this very thing from people who have stayed in hotels in Las Vegas, Kansas City, Atlantic City, and California. It only makes sense that killing someone and leaving their body under the bed of a hotel or motel room would be a great way to get away with murder, so long as the killer didn’t check in under their real name.
Another legend tells of a Halloween decoration of a hanged woman that turned out to be a real suicide. The truth in this case is spot-on. In Frederica, Delaware, a woman reportedly hanged herself in a tree near a busy road. The body remained there for over twenty-four hours and was witnessed by a number of drivers before someone reported it to the authorities. Then there are the numerous stories of people being buried alive and witnesses finding coffin lids with scratch marks in them, most likely the buried victims desperate to claw their way out before they perished from lack of air. But, in fact, live burials happened often back in the nineteenth century, so much so that one man, William Tebb, compiled a list of over two hundred cases of near-premature burial, 149 cases of actual premature burial, and a dozen cases where dissection or embalming had begun on a not-yet-deceased body. Granted, this was at a time when medical procedures were not as astute as they are today, especially in identifying a truly dead body from a still living one. The stuff of horror stories indeed, yet based on nuggets of truth.