The modern legend constitutes one of the most, may indeed even constitute the most widespread, popular, and vital folklore form of the present day; and what strikes me as perhaps its most outstanding feature is the creativity, imagination, and virtuosity brought to its performance by all kinds of people, old and young, well read and barely literate, educationally privileged and educationally deprived .

—from “The Modern Urban Legend ,”          
Katharine Briggs Lecture No. 1, delivered     
November 3, 1981, to the Folklore Society at
University College London, by Stewart F .      
Sanderson, director of the Institute of             
Dialect and Folk Life Studies in the                
University of Leeds