Scary Stories Urban Legend 2
Hooked Urban LegendYoung people in Colorado know the story of the hardened hitman who lost his mind after he was hired to kill an entire family. The job went wrong, and the contract killer lost both his hands in a gangland punishment. He was subsequently incarcerated at a
secure mental hospital out of town and told that he would never be released. In place of his hands the prison authorities attached two large hooks. Several years went by and people had forgotten about him, until one night he escaped after murdering a guard who had taken pity on him.
Bulletins went out on the local radio all night: he was highly dangerous and should not be approached. A young couple who had driven into the country for some privacy heard the reports while they were parked in a popular location overlooking the town. They realized that they had driven past the psychiatric facility only a few minutes earlier. The girl didn’t want to be out at night when the killer was on the loose, but the boy told her it would be fine and that they had probably caught him by then anyway. However, his date was having none of it so the boy reluctantly fired up the car and drove back into town, listening to the radio for updates. All the way home they heard a knocking noise coming from somewhere on the car, which he explained away as a regular problem. When they reached her house and got out of the vehicle, they saw what had been causing the noise: a large hook was hanging on the passenger door handle, covered in blood.
Behind the Mask Urban LegendA child in Japan was walking home from school one evening. The friends who usually walked with her had already gone home, but she was only one street away from her house. She saw a young woman walking towards her, wearing a surgical mask like those that many Japanese people use to protect themselves from smog and diseases. She stopped in front of the child and leaned down towards her. The child was not worried, as she seemed friendly enough.
“Where are you going?” the woman asked.
“I’m going home from school; my house is just down the road there.”
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” came the unexpected question. The girl politely, if a little concerned, said yes.
The woman then asked, as she removed the mask, “How about now?” and revealed a horrific wound that slashed her mouth from ear to ear.
She bent down to the frightened girl and asked again through her mutilated lips, “How about now?” The girl was horrified by her appearance but she had been brought up to be always polite, so she told her that she still looked beautiful. Then the terrifying figure disappeared. The next day at school the girl told her friends what she had seen and they immediately recognized the story. They told her that the woman had appeared to many girls over the years, but not all of them had been so lucky. If she hadn’t said the right thing, the woman would have cut the same terrible smile into the girl’s own face with a pair of scissors and condemned her to roam the streets in a mask. The shocked girl did not walk home alone again for a very long time.
The Green Man Urban LegendIn Pittsburgh children are told the
tale of the Green Man: a terrifying figure who lives alone in an abandoned house and wanders the country lanes at night, looking for kids to chase. He was also known as Charlie No-Face, because he had a terrible disfigurement; some said that he was born that way, whereas others believed that he was struck by lightning. Other possible explanations included an accident involving power lines or a horrendous crime that drove him insane. Whatever the cause, it had made his skin glow green in the dark, and just viewing his face was enough to induce terror. However, you always had plenty of warning before you came across him, as he was blind, so you could hear him tapping his way along the road with his stick.
Kids who played in the country at night would scare each other with stories about him, and young couples who drove out to the “
Green Man Tunnel” under the railroad would keep an eye out for him, as everybody knew that Charlie No-Face liked to wait under the bridge and tap on the steamy windows of cars with his stick. If you were brave, you would drive round the roads where he had been seen before, trying to catch sight of his face. Cars would drive from miles around.
Tragically, there was a real person behind this myth, but he wasn’t called Charlie. He was a local boy who had suffered a near-fatal electric shock aged eight, after daring to climb up a railway bridge. In doing so he accidentally touched a live electrical wire and was blasted with 20,000 volts. He lost his left arm below the elbow, as well as his eyes and nose, and his face was severely burned. Somehow he survived and eventually returned home to his family. He lived into old age, mostly spending his days inside, as his appearance in the bright light of day would scare people, but he wandered the country lanes at night, looking for someone to talk to. Once people got over his shocking appearance and got to know him, they said that he was actually a nice guy—proof of the saying that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Clowning Around Urban LegendA couple went out for a dinner date one night and left their children with a new babysitter. The mother was a little unsure about her, as she was quite young, and the children hadn’t been sleeping well lately after scaring each other with
stories about a bogeyman hiding in their bedrooms. She wanted to ring to check how things were going at home, but the father reassured her that it was better not to interfere. Just then the mother’s mobile phone rang and it was the babysitter, who said that there was no problem—the kids were fine—but “the clown” was creeping out all of them. Would it be OK if she moved it?
“What clown?” the mother asked.
“That weird clown figure that is standing in the corner of the living room?” the sitter explained. The mother told her to grab the children, go next door immediately and call her as soon as they got there. The babysitter replied, “OK, but why? There’s nothing to worry about.” The mother replied, “There is something to worry about. We don’t own a clown statue.”
Don’t Look Behind You Urban Legend
A young woman was driving home in her new SUV one night from a 24-hour supermarket. The high driving position made her feel safer on the road after her last car, a hatchback, was written off in an accident with a truck. A few minutes after she had pulled onto a main road, she noticed bright lights in her rear-view mirror. She paid no attention to them but they continued to dazzle her: the large truck behind her was flashing his lights. She decided to ignore the driver and accelerated away from him. It wasn’t safe to stop and she wasn’t far from her home in the suburbs, where her boyfriend would be waiting. Then the truck loomed in her mirror again and she could see the driver trying to get her to pull over.
She was worried he was going to ram her off the road, but soon she reached her junction and pulled off the main road. To her horror, however, she saw that the truck was still following her, so she put her foot down and screeched to a halt outside her house, running for the door. The truck driver pulled up some way behind her, lowered his window and yelled, “Get in your house and lock the door!” She turned round in surprise, as her boyfriend opened the door, and saw in the truck’s headlights a man roll out from underneath her car and run off down the road. When he had gone, the truck driver got out of his cab and approached her, explaining why he had been following her since she had left the supermarket: “That guy has been hanging underneath your car all the way here. I think he had a knife.”
Black-eyed Teens Urban LegendThis story first appeared in the early days of the internet, posted on a message board. A young professional in a Midwestern American town had gone to pick up some supplies from a late-night convenience store. After leaving the shop, he got into his car and prepared to drive off, when he heard a knock at the window. Standing there were two small boys, both quite young and wearing hoods. He wound the window down to see what they wanted and instantly felt that something was not quite right with these children, who were asking him where he lived. He wasn’t exactly scared, but for some reason he lied and said that he lived on the opposite side of town. They told him that was where they lived as well and that they needed a lift home because they had missed their bus. At that point it was past 10 p.m. and the man was aware that the buses had stopped running a few hours previously: what were they doing out at this time on their own?
The boys asked if he was going to let them in, saying that they were getting hungry, and one of them put his hand on the door handle, which the man quickly locked from the inside. The taller of the pair said that they were only kids, insisting, “We’re not going to do anything bad, but we can’t get in the car unless you ask us.” This kind of talk alarmed the driver. He started the car, but they knocked again, and he wondered whether leaving kids of that age alone in the dark would be the right thing to do. Then he noticed their eyes.
Their eyeballs were totally black, with no visible iris, as if they were full of jet-black ink. “You need to let us in; we can’t come in unless you ask us. You can’t leave us out here,” they repeated. He ignored them and sped off, and as he looked back in his mirrors, he saw that they had disappeared. Shaken by the incident, he posted a description on a local message board and it wasn’t long before his story was picked up nationwide. Several other sightings were reported up and down the country, all of them involving young children knocking on doors and windows of cars and houses, asking to be let in for food and becoming quietly insistent when they were denied access. Nobody knows what would happen if you beckoned them inside, because the only people who did were sadly unable to tell the tale.
Home Alone Urban LegendBritish newspapers reported the
mysterious case of a girl who was spending the day at home alone after her school was closed due to a snowstorm. She was watching TV in the living room when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye, in the glass doors that led out into the garden. There was a man standing in the bushes, staring directly at her. She screamed, and immediately sprang off the sofa and ran out of the room to call the police. When she got through, she told them that there was an intruder in her garden, and the operator told her to make sure all the doors and windows were locked. Officers were on their way but would be delayed by the snow on the roads.
She was terrified—she couldn’t remember whether the patio doors were locked or not—and it took all the courage she could muster to tiptoe back into the living room and check if the man was still in the garden. She couldn’t see him, and she quickly locked the doors. She endured an agonising wait by the front door until two policemen arrived. They told her that they were already searching for a dangerous suspect responsible for an assault in another home in the area and went outside to check the garden. To their confusion, they found that there were no footprints, despite the thick snow covering the grass. When they returned to the living room, they saw what they were looking for: a set of wet footprints behind the sofa. “You were very lucky, young lady. He was standing right behind you—what you saw was his reflection in the glass.”