Redditor u/Ghost7579ox asked, “What’s an urban legend you know that’s actually true?” From local myths to famous folklore, here are 14 urban legends that — surprise — aren’t just legends anymore, because we have the truth behind them:
Note: Responses have also been sourced from this similar thread.
1.In Western Pennsylvania, there is a nearly 70-year-old legend of a “Green Man” who only appears at night. Also known as “Charlie No Face,” he was said to be faceless, glow bright green, and would chase away anyone who encountered his solitary midnight walks. While his story has been altered through a decades-long game of telephone in the area, the “Green Man” did exist. His name was Raymond Robinson. In the Summer of 1919, he was dared by his friends to climb up to the top of a railroad bridge. In doing so, he grabbed onto something to pull himself up, which — unfortunately — was a live electrical wire. He was violently electrocuted and much of his arm and face were burnt off, permanently disfiguring the young boy and rendering him mostly blind.
The legend came about when residents — and specifically, teens — of Raymond’s neighborhood would see him walking around at night in the ’50s and ’60s. He specifically went out at night to avoid unnecessary attention from others. Teens at the time reported that he was a nice guy, very into baseball, and — in exchange for a beer and some cigarettes — would share stories.
After passing in the ’80s and with most of the teens that met him growing up or moving away, Raymond’s story took on a life of its own and became the legend it is today. You can read more about it here.
Suggested by: xGlowyBubblesz
2.“The ‘Angel’s Glow’ after the Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War in 1862. It was reported that injured soldiers’s wounds would glow with a bluish-green hue, and many miraculously recovered from their wounds, had lower infection rates, and healed more quickly. Many believe the recovery was attributed to angels, who healed the soldiers and caused that bright glow, so soldier’s deemed it the ‘Angel’s Glow.’ However, researchers later discovered the battlefield was full of bioluminescent bacteria, which aided in healing wounds.”
Well over a century later, a high school student and his mother — who was a microbiologist — collected samples from the battlefield. Essentially, they discovered that the healing glow was likely due to a relationship between the bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens and microscopic soil nematodes, aka worms.
As explained by The University of Texas Medical Branch Health, “When the bacteria emits light, it attracts insects, allowing the worm to infect them. Once inside, the worm regurgitates the bacteria into the insects’ blood, killing the insect and other toxic microbes present. This may be what happened with Angel’s Glow. Soldiers’ wounds became contaminated with the nematodes. The worms likely released their toxins and enzymes, essentially cleaning the wound by killing pathogenic bacteria.”
You can listen to their podcast episode and learn more about it here.
The photo above is not a depiction of the bacterium and worm’s glow specifically, but of bioluminescence in the ocean as an example.
Zhengshun Tang / Getty Images
3.“In my college town, there was one homeless guy who everyone kind of knew of. He stood out because he always wore a black suit with no shirt and walked around barefoot with no baggage or shopping cart or anything. A rumor started going around that he was actually a famous painter whose work sold for thousands, that he had a patron who took care of him, and that he just lived like a vagrant out of preference and as a result of his schizophrenia. Most people called bullshit, including me, until I met someone that knew his name and confirmed it. His name is William Laga.”
You can read more about William and his work — as well as the documentary Mondays with William inspired by it — here.
4.“There was a house in West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, that was reported to slowly send everyone living there crazy. It was rumored to be cursed or haunted. It turned out there was an overgrown water tank in the yard with a hidden Datura plant growing above it that would drop flowers onto the tank. The people living there were micro-dosing a deliriant, explaining their actions.”
Datura is also known as Thornapple, Moonflower, or Jimsonweed. According to the U.S. Forest Service, “Daturas have been used as poisons, medicines, and ritual intoxicant agents since time immemorial” and ingesting even a tiny bit of any part of the Datura plant can cause “delirium, frenzy, powerful hallucinations, coma, and death.”
Bob Steiner / Getty Images
5.“The existence of Starlight Tours. There was an urban legend in the Canadian Prairies about a man who would kidnap Indigenous people, steal their winter clothes, and abandon them in the middle of nowhere to die in -30º temperatures. The idea of Starlight Tours spread a bit to the general non-indigenous population as well, and I remember people jokingly warning each other at high school house parties to be vigilant if they were going to walk home a fair distance.”
“Turns out, Starlight Tours were real and that it was the police who were doing it. The police in Saskatoon would grab Indigenous people during the winter months and abandon them on the city outskirts to die. These suspicious deaths would then be documented and covered up by a variety of racist notions.
The Indigenous communities would insist that it made no sense for someone to be able to walk that far out of the city without a jacket in -30º, but the police wouldn’t investigate and just say things like, ‘he must have been drunk’ to cover it up.
To many indigenous people, it was never an urban legend but instead an open act of violence. To many non-indigenous communities, people thought it was somewhere between an urban legend or an exaggeration (though I’m sure many knew the truth behind it).
At least in Saskatoon, Canada, this is said to have started at least in the 1990s and went on until the 2000s, but the idea of it goes back to the ’70s. I am sure there are more cases of this outside of Saskatoon, but I don’t know specifically.
Despite there being convictions for related incidents in the police force, no one was ever actually convicted from the police for the Starlight Tours themselves. The same police stations also supposedly got in hot water for trying to delete Wikipedia articles about the incident.”
You can read more about the specifics of these horrific Starlight tours here.
—None
6.“The Legend of the Funhouse Mummy. Elmer McCurdy was a bank and train robber killed in a shootout in 1911. His body was embalmed and put on display. It ended up going on tour, even being used in a couple of films. His body went missing in the 1960s. It turned up again in a fun house in Long Beach, CA, which was going to be used for the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. The crew was removing the mannequins when the arm fell off one of them, and they noticed a bone sticking out. The police were called, and that’s how he was found. McCurdy’s body was buried in Guthrie, OK.”
While it might sound like a made-up story to scare kids, it’s 100% true. You can read more about it here.
Universal History Archive / Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
7.“There was an urban legend in the UK about a guy called Purple Aki. The rumor was that he was a giant bodybuilder who roamed around Liverpool asking young men if he could squeeze their muscles and measure them, then asking if they could squat him. I heard it as a London teen years ago and thought it was a hilariously bizarre urban legend from those wild kids in Liverpool. Then, it came out that a teenager died after running away from him and accidentally getting hit by a train. Suddenly, the real Purple Aki was all over the news.”
His real name was Akinwale Arobieke — shortened to Aki — and “Purple” was a racially charged reference to the color of his skin, which — as a part of his lore — was described as being “so black he’s purple.” While accounts of him hanging around gyms or rugby leagues persisted in the area, so did rumors online of things he’d done or connections he had — like his father being a High Court judge or Nigerian royalty — furthering him into more of a boogeyman figure and making him go viral.
The mostly-true story the Redditor above mentions took place in the summer of 1986 in New Brighton. Akinwale Arobieke — 25 at the time — approached 16-year-old Gary Kelly, whom he’d been reported to have stalked and threatened for months prior, going so far as to show up at his home and bus stop. The day of his death, Gary fled his friend group upon seeing Aki and hid out in the nearby railway station, first in an idle train and then making his way across the platform. Seeing that Aki followed him, he climbed under a train on the tracks and touched a live rail, which electrocuted and killed him. Arobieke was put in jail for two and a half years.
You can read more about the story here.
8.“In my hometown, there is a house that was once used as a safe house for the infamous mobster Al Capone. The town is situated along the banks of a fairly large river, and some years after this mob safe house was shut down, a tunnel was discovered underneath it that led to the river, presumably meant to be used as an escape route should the police discover the house while members of the mob were there and needed to get away. It was speculated that there might be other tunnels in town, and many of the kids at my high school wondered if there could be tunnels under the school, with the entrances hidden within the building and exits hidden in places just off campus grounds. This was summarily denied and dismissed by faculty and staff and treated as a joke by almost everyone. Until… one was found.”
“The entrance was discovered in the school auditorium, beneath the stage, behind one of the walls of the orchestra pit. I went into it once but took no more than a few steps. Students who explored deeper into the tunnel said they had gone much, much further, likely as far as the opposite end of campus. They said it looked like the tunnel went further but was blocked off and locked, and they were unable to see if there was an exit that led back above ground.
Even after its discovery, the faculty continued to deny the existence of any other tunnels beneath the school. But they could no longer deny that there was at least one.”
Ullstein Bild Dtl. / ullstein bild via Getty Images
9.“There used to be a hippy cult in the woods (nearish) my town in the ’60s. Ultra rich, but think, drum circles and cocaine. So, so much cocaine. One day, they just…disappeared. Abandoned the compound, and nobody knew why. They just all left overnight. Assumptions ranged from an incoming drug raid to a murder in the compound, you name it. Most people don’t think it was real anymore, or that it was just some weirdo eccentric dude in the woods, and the story took a life of its own. It became a legend.”
“I know it’s real, though, because I’ve been to the compound. Many years ago, I noticed a weird road when driving past the area for work. It was overgrown and not on Google Maps. I took my lunch/ciggy break right there and then and went to check it out.
The place was massive, with stables and several large houses (now kind of caved in). Inside, everything was still like it was back then: furniture, dining wear, clothes, magazines. It was like someone had just left for the store. I mean, minus the 30+ years of mildew and moss. There was not a single car in the garages, though.
10.“Rogue waves used to be an urban legend. For centuries, sailors talked about encountering sudden single waves that were described as reaching 100 feet high. Nobody believed them because everyone assumed these waves were just another one of the stories sailors on leave would make up to impress pubgoers. As the 20th century came along, oceanographic research became more formalized and advanced. Yet no researcher was able to record hard data on these waves, apart from just writing down their own experience of getting hit by one. An anecdote isn’t really something you can publish.”
“In the 1980s, the Draupner gas field was discovered on the North Sea, and a new type of oil platform was set up there. To assess the integrity of the new design, the platform was installed with sensors not normally present on other platforms, one of which was a wave height recorder. It was only in 1995 that those sensors recorded a single 85-foot wave hitting the platform, and rogue waves were finally accepted to be a real phenomenon.”
You can read more about the discovery of rogue waves here.
—None
Kelly Headrick / Getty Images/500px Prime
11.“The ‘Construction Clown’ in Cincinnati, Ohio. I lived in Roselawn and Bridgetown as a kid and started to hear stories from friends about a middle-aged man with a clown collar/ruff, hard hat, clown suit, and a construction worker’s metal toolbox riding the public transit ‘all day’ without purpose, or milling around construction sites. There’s no way that’s true, I thought, until one day, I took a bus to a local Kroger grocery store for something. As I walked through the parking lot to the store, I saw him standing outside the front doors, toolbox in hand, hard hat, white ruffed collar, bright red sweatshirt, overalls, and work boots painted yellow. It was terrifying. I milled around the parking lot for what felt like forever and noticed that most people coming and going from the store were avoiding the guy. He just stood there, not moving, in the middle of the entry/exit doors of that Kroger.”
“Suddenly, though, he was gone. I didn’t see if he walked away or got into a car or went inside, but I had lost my nerve completely and went back to the bus stop. As soon as I paid the fare and looked up to find a seat, there he was…just sitting in the middle of the bus. I realized the bus had also stopped right in front of the grocery store, so he must have gotten on there. Anyway, I sat one row back from him, and he didn’t move or say a word until it was time for me to exit. I saw him again a few more times in the neighborhood, almost always in passing while he was riding the bus again or standing at various bus stops. He was always dressed in the red sweatshirt and overalls or a full-on clown suit. One time he had a shovel. Then, one day, he was just gone, and people stopped talking about him.
Probably 20 years later when I was in my thirties, I was visiting home and running around the city with my mom. We ended up in Covington, Kentucky, doing something or other, and were stuck in traffic on MLK Boulevard. As we inched up the road, I looked over and saw a silver bust statue of the guy! It was in front of the Hellmann Creative Center. I completely lost it…nobody, including my mother, had ever believed me when I told stories of seeing this guy when I was a kid, but there’s a fucking statue of him right there on the side of the road!
Anyway, meet Raymond Thunder-Sky, Cininnati’s ‘Construction Clown.’
12.“A contestant on The Newlywed Game answered the question, ‘Where’s the weirdest place you’ve had the urge to make love?’ with ‘in the ass.’ The show’s host, Bob Eubanks, had sworn for decades that the clip wasn’t real and was a false memory, and he even offered a $10,000 reward if anyone could ever find the clip. Since the host had denied it, and there were several similar rumored incidents on game shows that had been proven false, people started assuming this one was also a false memory or Mandela effect. As it turns out, the clip was real and a Game Show Bloopers special in 2002 ended up airing it. Here’s the clip.”
13.“The university I attended in Texas had an urban legend about a student who got lost and died in the maintenance tunnels under the campus. I had always thought it was a rumor because many ghost stories were tied to it. That was until my senior year when I got a part-time job at the university. It turns out that there was an extensive tunnel network under the school that fed steam to the buildings for heat. Anyone who went into the tunnels was required to have someone with them to prevent another death.”
14.And finally, “The Great Potato Salad Massacre back in 1976 is an urban legend in my small Alabama town. The story takes place in the middle of July, on a day with soaring temperatures. Folks are at a Southern Baptist Church summer picnic. Someone’s husband put the potato salad in the back trunk of his car the night before, not knowing it needed to be refrigerated. At the picnic, he put it on the food table, oblivious. Everyone ate it. These are Southern Baptists, after all.”
“An hour later, the fuse was lit, so to speak. Nay, a hundred fuses were lit. The men were playing softball. The women were trading pie recipes. The kids were swimming in the pond. Suddenly, mayhem ensued. Gastro-explosions erupted in every last one of those who ate the salad.
The massacre is what happened in their britches, and to the outhouses; the lucky few got to use them. Everyone else either decimated and desecrated the bushes, the trees, or their car seats, as they foolishly thought they could make it home in time.
How do I know this is true? My grandpa is the man that was in charge of the potato salad. He didn’t eat any. My grandma reminds him of it all the time, since they were excommunicated from the church.”
Do you know of an urban legend that’s actually been proven to be true, like these? Big or small, tell us about it in the comments below.
Submissions have been edited for length, factual accuracy, and/or clarity.
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