Saturday 1 May 2010

Urban Legends

Last night I watched the 1998 movie, Urban Legend, starring Joshua Jackson and Jared Leto.  It got me thinking… what are the scariest of urban legends?

Urban legends are stories we all grow up with.  They are modern day folklore, and the stories are passed from person to person, most often on particular nights such as Halloween.  After all, who doesn’t enjoy a scary story at Halloween?

These are my creepiest…

The Clown and the Babysitterimages00

As with most urban legends there are several versions of this story, but most are based around the babysitter and the intruder story.

A babysitter is taking care of a baby while its parents are out.  When she goes up to check on the baby she sees a life-size statue of a clown standing in the corner of the room.  She feels like the clown is watching her and she can’t get it out of her mind.  When the father calls later to see how things are she says the baby is fine, but could she move the life-size statue of the clown as it is freaking her out. The father then tells her to call 999 immediately.  She asks why and he tells her they do not have a statue of a clown..

Clowns have always freaked me out. I think I watched ‘IT’ at too young an age!

Bloody Mary

This urban legend was also the basis of the Clive Barker movie, Candyman.  I think that is the reason Bloody Mary gives me the chills.

Mary, (sometimes known as Mary Worth) was a very beautiful woman. She was well aware of her beauty and would spend hours in front of a mirror admiring herself.  Then one day she was in a terrible accident which not only killed her, but disfigured her face horribly. From that point on her ghost haunts mirrors, and anyone who repeated her name in a mirror would find themselves either disfigured or dead.

The bathroom mirror in the dead of the night is often a porthole for ghost stories.  I, for one, will never repeat the words Bloody Mary, or Candyman, in front of a mirror.

Live Worm Inside Patients Eye

A man thought he had dust caught in his eye as it was irritable.  He rubbed and rubbed at it, and it got redder and redder.  He bought eye drops, but his eye just got worse.  When he went to see his doctor the doctor ordered a scan.  The doctor thought he saw a cyst and arranged for an operation to have the cyst removed. But when the doctor cut into the cyst what they actually found was a live worm…

eye 

Gross!

When I studied Parasites at university my lecturer actually told us a very similar story. To this day I have no idea if what  he told us was true, or if it was simply another version of this urban legend.  What ever the truth, the idea of having any kind of living bug growing inside my eye is enough to give me nightmares!

3 comments:

  1. That eye thing is definitely the most disturbing. It seems like it could happen! Ugh!!

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  2. I LOVE Urban Legends -- my favorite was featured in the movie you mentioned, where the girl comes back to her college dorm to get her purse and doesn't turn on the light, then comes back the next morning to find her dead roommate on the bed and the words, "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights?!" written in blood on the wall!

    Actually, that eye surgery is real -- it's of a 5 year old boy who had a botfly egg/maggot in his skin. The botfly maggots are especially bad because they feast on LIVE flesh (other maggots are content with dead flesh). So there have been cases of people being eaten alive -- literally! You can go to YouTube to see some extractions, and Matthew Pearl's novel The Dante Club features the botfly maggots as well (eeeewww!)

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  3. Okay, I just upchucked there a little. :P

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