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What's an urban legend from YOUR hometown?
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I had a few local legends in a world I made for some time, which are simply called "the green stone" and "The giants made from men"
to summarize the green stone first, underground somewhere in this town in a dark, thick swamp filled with all sorts of horror monsters (ranging from your stereotypical werewolves and vampires to bonkers stuff like a witch with a crocodile's head and "the wild hunt", which is basically a giant ghost tornado), there is a cave originally mined out by dwarves, in an attempt to gather materials, while they were down there, they eventually encountered a mysterious, glowing green stone within the thick cavern. eventually, after staying near it to long, every dwarf who was in the mine at that time ended up dying due to mysterious circumstances.
the actual reasoning for the myths formation is because the area in question is under a blockade by a vampire duke, and serves 2 main purposes. 1, it serves as a cautionary tale to not explore the mines, as well as to not let greed overtake you. and 2, it serves to keep the vampire duke in control. the reason for both is because the "green stone" in question is actually a Uranium deposit, hence why the dwarves died mysteriously and why the vampire duke wants to prevent people from obtaining it (vampires in my world are much more vulnerable to high forms of radiation, namely the sun, compared to other species, although its rare to encounter anything that could cause as much radiation at the time the story takes place).
to explain the other myth, there once were 2 large towns that decided to hold a festival that had been practiced in order to appease a god (theories sought to decide which god, but most assume its most likely a god of order or life, namely focusing on towns & cities). all the townspeople from both towns obtained mass amounts of rope and eventually decided to tie everyone together. after several hours of doing this, both towns managed to form 2 large giants, both of which became known as "The Giants made of men", and eventually fought in a competition, however, one of these giants fell, and all the townspeople who made up the giant ended up dying due to either the fall or the weight of the bodies that fell. as for the other giant, it eventually became a hive mind of people, all seeking to continue as the giant made of men, and they were never seen again.
to explain the reason for that myth. for one, the actual myth was inspired by a real-life book, who's story roughly follows the same plot points. as for why this myth was formed, again, the area this myth was formed in was under reign by a vampire, with no way to call for outside help, the myth is a way to tell people to assure people its ok to reject authority figures, as it may lead down a dangerous path. the leaders of both towns sought to perform such an act that eventually led to the death of their entire towns, much like how the vampire in question is causing the town to suffer by draining it, both literally and figuratively.
In New England, we have a giant cat with a spiked ball on the end of his tail, and we call him the wumpus cat or the dingball. You must never pet or feed him, or else he will become very happy and wag his tail, smashing anyone nearby.
I am from Kriens, Switzerland, at the foot of the mountain Pilatus. We have two stories here. Of course, there is a dragon on the top of the mountain.
The other story is that the name Pilatus came from Pontius Pilate. Legends say that after his death, he was thrown into the Oberalpsee (Top Alp lake). That's why we have such harsh weather on the mountain.
I grew up in a seaside town in England called Blackpool, and there's a theme park there called The Pleasure Beach. There's a clown automaton in a glass case that is perpetually laughing maniacally, that a lot of locals believes is cursed or haunted. The Pleasure Beach is an old amusement park; a lot of its oldest rides were built around the Victorian era and thus were predominantly made of wood, and one day the park caught fire. It was put out, but in the middle of this fire, where everything around it was burnt or damaged, was this laughing clown, completely unscathed and still laughing maniacally.
Years ago, I made up a nursery rhyme for a Yu-Gi-Oh AU where Dark Yugi was an urban legend like Freddy Krueger that everyone in this particular town knew about. You're supposed to repeat a chant when you go out at night to reassure 'Yami-San' that you've been good and he didn't need to play a game with you. I wonder if I should revisit that…
Oh, my hometowns urban legend? Poky High is haunted. Really. It's been investigated by Ghost Hunters twice. And now it's been revealed that the funeral home across the street had hundreds of rotting bodies underneath it because the director was an incompetent piece of crap who operated without a license and lied about cremating and donating bodies to science as requested and just letting them rot down there
So now we know where all the ghosts come from!
Love your videos, happy Christmas, happy holidays and Happy New Year.
Hej på dig du!🇸🇪
I've never heard of the 6 eyed moose, what's that about?
There's a story in our city that this boy named Haddara was lost in the desert to his nomad parents so a flock of ostriches adopted him and he learned their ways andspeech, he was found when he was about 40 and brought back to society acting like a bird, my friend is actually his great grandson lol it's obviously not really what happened but i believe there's some true story behind it and it's so interesting to think about
Bunnyman Bridge
In a D&D campaign I ran (which was a horror game set in an active but monster-overrun asylum), there was a legend among the asylum patients of a man who fell into a grain thresher and had most of his skin cut off, but he survived and got some of his skin sewn back on. After he (somewhat) recovered, he began killing people he blamed for his accident, causing him to be committed to the asylum, where he either eventually died, or remains locked up in isolation somewhere.
This story is completely untrue. Or, at least it was until some unrelated stuff happened that made the asylum get infused with energies from the Dimension of Dreams, causing some dream mists to coalesce and form a dangerous imitation of this previously imaginary creature.
In the book im writing, I take a total shift from the main story to write about a place called Parallel Forest.
A total of five chapters are dedicated to this place; three chapters one way, cut back to the main story for two chapters, only for the main party to be taken back through the forest for 2 chapters.
Parallel forest is a place that doesn't have any life at all, other than the grotesque, overgrown canapy that nearly blocks out the sunlight. It has a surreal and unnerving silence.
I made up some urban legenda about the forest in order to build on the world I've built up and expand beyond it being a war-tirn nation.
For the longest time, i thought maybe it wasn't necessary and would distract from the main story, but i kept it for the sake of worldbuilding.
In my home town there's a vacant lot on a hill where the biggest house in the neighborhood once stood. People called it the "big house on the hill." It was built by the village founder as a residence for his large family, but then it burned down a few years ago and the village tore down the remains as they were seen as an "eyesore." I always imagined going to explore the burned wreckage, but I wonder how many secrets were lost when it was demolished, and how many remain…
I remember when I was like 6 or 7 years old, in the village I grew up in, there was a dirty discarded shoe lying on the side of the road. It lay there for a couple days until it was removed and at some point (though I can't recall how it started or who ended up telling me this) a rumour spread that inside that shoe, a child's foot was found, which then lead to the story of how some guy murdered his wife and daughter and fled.
That story coincided with a family in my neighborhood moving away and teeny-tiny me was so worried bc I knew them. I think it was just the local kids trying to scare one another since I don't remember any of the adults ever saying something about it, and of course it was fake. But just the idea that something as simple as an old shoe on the side of the road can cause a story like this to spread is kinda nutty.
LAS VEGAS BABY WE GOT THE LAKE MEAD MONSTER
Ok. HP Lovecraft. I really hate how often the man is shown in this light. Im sorry, i really enjoy your content but you are doing a disservice to HP Lovecraft as a person by just describing his action in writing in the way you did.
Fact is, HP Lovecraft had a lot of Xenophobic tendencies which he then used in his writing, something which he denounced and was sad over before his death. This is true, cannot be denied, he even said so himself. But the reason behind it isnt because he did it on purpose to demonize the people. But because of the word "Xenophobia" itself. Xenophobia, as any phobia, refers to a certain fear. This being the fear of other things or other people you do not know in the way you know the things and people around you.
Here is another fact: Lovecraft was Xenophobic towards almost everything in his life as he lived in sheer paranoia which then overall lead to his xenophobic tendencies. The man made a story about a color we cannot percieve. Hillbillies conjuring a great one into existance. A strange town and its people huddling together with Fishpeople and not to forget: A story about a literal AC unit. An AC Unit which was just introduced around that time where he wrote it. And his strange mind went to a place where this AC unit would be able to keep the dead from dying.
Lovecraft has not purposefully written black people, queer people or otherwise as his antagonists or even bad people. He has written them as such as he had little to no experience with them and was paranoid of anything that he had no knowledge over. Saying something along the lines of "It was done intentional" simply paints him as a racist when you have plenty of other examples where he quite literally didnt do that. He made literally more than one Book and more than one where Black People werent the villains, Future Me.
I grew up in (and still live in) a very rural area so I’m a bit disconnected from local urban legends. I genuinely can’t think of any from my area
Tropes about bullied theater kids don't make sense to me because at my college they were the only student organization on campus with patron ghosts. And even if you don't quite believe, why risk being the reason the cute jokes people whisper about a building they've been using for a century turn sinister?
To me Bleach has the greatest world building what do you think
In my world, there's a type of demon that possesses people then uses their body as a disguise to kill and eat people, however they are easily identifiable if you know what your doing. There are also various tales of people somehow becoming half possessed by various means, becoming a a creature with a demon's bloodlust and abilities, but not identifiable by the normal means, because of in my opinion a natural development of having something like a demon that can hide among humans but with a distinct tell is that someone's gonna go, "but wouldn't it be scary if it lacked that tell"
When I lived in provo the bus I took to elementary school always went over a bridge so when you look out the window, under the bridge, there was a house a really old and run down house. And every time we passed that house the kids on the bus would talk about the "Hooked Man", he was a man who killed his wife with a hook and died in the river next to the house back in the pioneer time and has been haunting the house ever since. Don't remember any stories of it beside that initial one though.
This was such an interesting video! Once again! I am so amazed by your videos! Keep up the good work!!
Here is my urban legend: Imagine a small town in the northern parts of Hungary… Your environment looks beautiful; you are surrounded by beautiful hills and forests and when you turn to the other side, you can see the valley of a small river.
But this picturesque little town has a dark figure in its forests: the Bearded Wolf. Legends say the Bearded Wolf terrorized the locals. It attacked the animals and people. Everyone feared that one hill where they usually saw the wolf… until one day, a woman, married to the local shepherd, went up to that hill. She knew that her husband was there with the sheep and she wanted to deliver him some lunch. She found the sheep, but didn't find her beloved husband. She was worried… what if something bad happened..? What if… her husband was eaten by the wolf? Suddenly she was attacked from behind! The Bearded Wolf jumped at her and with its claws and teeth teared parts out of the woman's clothes. She was terrified, but she fought back. She managed to beat the wolf with a rock and escaped. The wolf was dead. Later she went back to search for her husband, but what she found was even more terrifying than the wolf itself. She found her husband's dead body with a head injury and her clothes in his mouth. The Bearded Wolf was her husband all along.
She started to put stones on the body and even today, if you go to that hill and see the grave of the bearded wolf, you must put a rock on its grave or it will escape death and haunt you forever.
This legend was so strong in my hometown, we even have a statue of the wolf and we talked about this story all the time in elementary school.
We have something all the kids refer to as "The Old Man in the Woods." Its…a weird thing to talk about because I'm a part of where this originated…and even now, something like 28 years later, I'm not sure what it is I've encountered, because it doesn't add up rationally.
See, this suburban town I live in is this mix of massive middle-class neighborhoods, shopping centers, and natural features that were…just…built around. Part of this is because there is a sizable creek that winds up and down, around and through the area that feeds the local watershed, and the places where that creek travels has some of the worst hilly terrain in the area. So they just…built around it. Ultimately, this means that when I was young, they built a brand new middle school at the top of one of those hills, surrounded on 3 sides by very hilly woods with running/hiking trails and the creek. Except the woods dont actually extend more than 1/2 a mile in any one direction. Anyway. The woods are weird as is. The terrain is full of both old and new growth trees, hard woods and pines, and several species of plant that are technically endangered. And if you wander through them, you find…weird stuff. You find the rusted over farm tractor from the 1930s, still attached to some kind of equipment, with trees growing in and around it that are a bit too old to be there. You find timbers that are the crossbeams for some old building. A car from the 60s buried up to the side mirrors with its nose to the sky at the bottom of a hill. Pottery that is hand made. Arrowheads of indigenous make.
And then there's the Old Man.
He only ever appears to children. In middle school, we first saw him, the year the school opened. He never leaves the woods, but when we were outside, playing on the blacktop or doing sports for Gym…people saw him. Different classes, different times of the school day. Watching. He's older, bearded, like some kind of mountain man. He wears faded denim pants and a white shirt with a flannel overshirt. He's got this floppy, old style hat that wouldnt look out of place in a photo of "American Railroad Workers, 1850s". His face is always in shadow under it…
Yet you can always see his eyes. Somehow.
He never approaches–and if anyone approaches him, tries to get closer, he vanishes. Just…poof. Gone. Like he stops existing.
If you try to point him out to an adult, they look right at him and dont see him.
If you go into the woods too close to dark…you feel eyes on you.
IF you're a teen, its like being watched by a parent. Like you know a mom, or dad, or uncle is making sure you dont fall and break something.
But if you're an adult…your skin crawls. You see lights where there shouldnt be–like a flickering porchlight in a space you know is actually forty feet in the air over a steep drop. This sense of foreboding "unwelcome" like walking unannounced and uninvited to someone's home.
As an adult, I'm fairly rational. I try to look for the obvious answers. I'd've chalked it up to a weird homeless person or some hermit from before the population here exploded from <10,000 people to almost half a million in two decades…but apparently he's still seen by kids. Kids that are completely disconnected from the original group who saw him, because this area is very fluid in who lives here, what with lots of military and government.
So those of us who've been here for a long time know "Don't mess with the Old Man. He's harmless if you leave him alone." Whether he's real or some weird hallucination, or just an amalgamation of several iterations of a homeless man in the woods…no one's quite sure. But better safe than sorry, especially because that forest itself is so freaking weird.
Okay I needed to see this. Now I'm off to describe a monster for my book for their network of unexpored catacombs
Our culture keeps children up with stories about boogeymen, fantasy novels keep children up with stories of mandatory schooling.
“Mom said if I don’t stop trying to run into the haunted forest that shes gonna send me off to Sanderson Elementary school”
“There’s no way that is real”
“I heard they make you sit and do nothing for forever, make you eat pig slop and ‘let’ you play two times a day for like a minute”
“I tried pig slop once”
“Yeah and they send you to a dungeon if you move around too much”
That's a very long intro
The Glastonbury glawackus used to keep me awake at night
My favorite will always be The Beast of Gevaudan, because even though we don't know for certain what we was, we know more than a hundred people died in 18th century France, and it even had political impact
I absolutely love urban legends and cryptids. I don’t believe in them, but I find them endlessly fascinating. So much so that I've incorporated the idea of them into the novel I'm trying to write. Cryptids in my world are the offspring of gods and they range anywhere from humanoid to completely animalistic or monsterish and depending on the type of creature, they might desire to help and protect humans or kill them and eat them.
A fantasy series i really enjoyed called The Spellmonger series does this very well. In the first chapter, there is a reference to an urban legend that sort of a boogyman for these people, the demon god of the Mindins, Korbal. Well, 10 books in, its revealed he does exist and is the primary atagonist for much of the series. Later on he kinda gets his ass handed to and keeps to himself while the true BBEG begins to stir.
Hey man, love your content. Just wanna correct your pronunciation of "cuero," real quick though, because it sounds like you're saying "quiero" which means "I want." Cuero is pronounced, coo-ehr-oh. Hope this helps!
There Is this place in my grandmather's Town called "the Stone of the bufa." I don't even know what bufa means. I know that people say that Stones leaks gold from time to time.
There’s an Inn in my town that Buffalo Bill stayed at that’s really famous for having a ghost in it. The legend goes that Miss Kate was lady who worked in room service until she died. Her last wish was that they would cremate her and put her ashes in the walls of the Inn. There’s a story of a guy who was working there who was that last one there for the night, and all he had left to do was the dishes. When he came into the kitchen Miss Kate was there and had already started doing the dishes for him. She continued to help him do the dishes, and, if I recall correctly, they had a pleasant conversation before she vanished into thin air. Some kids in my town made a horror movie about her that they filmed in the Inn, which made me sad because in all the stories Miss Kate always seemed to be benevolent ghost.
The black panthers of victoria
A unique tv show episode with an urban legend is Season 1 Episode 15 because it explains how the urban legend actually started.
13:42 you're a poet Harry.
It is I, a simple man, looking to updoot the video in the algo.
One if the legends that's been passed down in my family (and many other hispanics) is the Cucuy (or coco/coca). It takes various forms of women that are reptilian to a 'boogeman' that lingers in the shadows. Since the form can be anything, the only thing that can be said is that it has an ear that listens to disobedient children and will take them away to be eaten, never to be seen again. This scares children to the point of not wanting to be in the dark, be alone in a room and to jump on their bed rather than walk over.
As a side note, Hispanics always have that one room in their house that they will not enter without a light because it has bad vibes or spirits. Not sure why.
Thx for the video!
One thing: The music is very annoying and repetitiv.
Castlevania’s usage of Cryptids/Urban Legends has always been interesting, but it makes sense since the series itself is a love letter to the silver screen monster movies. But Dracula in particular is pretty interesting considering that over the course of the entire franchise there’s been 3 and they’re all completely separate from each other. There’s Gabriel Belmont from the LoS franchise and he’s by far the strongest iteration of Dracula. There’s Mathias Cronqvists from the original franchises who ended up taking the name Vlad as a title, and then there’s Vlad Țepeș from the show (who’s basically just a much weaker version of Mathias).
I'm surprised you didn't mentioned Batman and his rogues gallery, and the Arkham Asylum. All the mystique of him and his villains are based on urban legends; Solomon Grundy the most explicit of them.
– The legend of a man-bat who punish criminals at night.
– The legend of a dominatrix who dresses as a cat at night to commit robbery.
– The legend of a botanist who went mad and gained the power to control plant life.
– The legend of an attorney who was deformed by a man he accused, and now walk around flipping a coin to determine people's fate.
– The legend of a clown that went mad and finds amusing to torture people.
– The legend of a young doctor working an Asylum who was turned mad by the her patient, the mad clown.
Maybe this is why the Batmania continues on, even though the superhero fatigue is hitting hard. Urban legends are so powerful that we can't look away, we are drawn to them like moths to the flame.
To those who play RPGs I think this is a wonderful way to have your party shape the world.
They will spawn myths and legends.
What's the movie at 21:16?
The Princess of owatonna
About Bloody Mary, there's this version of the legend in Brazil called Loira do Banheiro (the Blonde of the Bathroom) that creeps me out till this day. She's a ghostly apparition with long blond hair that cover her scared face, paper white skin and has cotton in her nostrils and ears. She can be summoned, of course (and there's a LOT of ways you can call her) but she don't NEED it. She can appear at will at any bathroom, and if she sees you there she won't kill you. No, she will grab you and drag you with her through the mirror, where you will be forever trapped. I think that's a way to alert young children (especially girls) to not go to public bathrooms alone, since the blond is councious of her scars and doesn't like to appear when a lot of people are there, but when i was little i would lock my bathroom door at night cause i was afraid that the blond would appear in my bathroom and walk to my room to grab me while i was sleeping and kidnap me.
Local Urban Legend: Charlotte, NC
The auditorium of Northwest School of the Arts is haunted by the ghost of Sadie. There are different versions of her life & death, but the most common is that she was a performing arts strident of some kind who was in the school after hours, went to the rafters above the stage where lights are hung, and fell. She was caught in the wires and strangled to death, and now continues to haunt the auditorium & other parts of the school where students learn theater, dance, & music.
Almost all of her stories amount to childish jump scares, but in my favorite she was a benevolent ghost. Chris was starting their first day of Theater Tech, and arrived late. They were told they had to go to the grid, the upper portion of the school’s black box theater, but Chris only knew the building. As Chris looked for the door upstairs they heard a knock & opened it. It was the door to balcony leading to the grid, and both were empty. To this day my friend Chris says Saidie is a bro for helping them out
Genuinely surprised he didn't mention The Painted Lady from ATLA but overall, good video!
Not interacted with enough, but I think I can use it into a ground work for a story I sketched out. Thank you. It's been bouncing around my head for years, and I excited this this option.
My area doesn’t really have any myths but I have a personal lil belief that red cardinals are loved ones coming to visit the living,it’s a touching idea I hold unto