Urban legends of your community

Kyriakos

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Tonight i learned of two urban legends (well technically only one is a legend, for the other one has indeed happened...) of Thessaloniki.

-The first one is that in the west (less developed) part of the city there is an old lady that asks for help with her groceries, telling people to get them to her apartment, but they then are nowhere to be found.

That was the urban legend. Now the far more terrifying real event:

-Some years ago a girl who is related in a way to the person who narrated this story to me tonight, was at some big department store at the periphery of the city, where population is little and buildings are sparse. Hers was the only car in the drive way, where she returned after having bought the things she wanted to get out of the store, and there she saw a very old woman, dressed in typical mourning orthodox attire (black dress and something covering her head as well). She claimed that she was in extreme pain, and needed a ride to the nearest hospital. The girl agreed, and soon they were in her car.

While she was driving, at some point, to her absolute horror she noticed that the hands of the old woman had thick hairs on them. She was no old woman at all... But the girl managed to keep her relative calm, and when they neared another vehicle she deliberately bumped into it so that she would cause the other driver to show up. Needless to say the "old woman" left immediately when the car stopped...

Police examined the case, and it turns out the man who was dressed as an old woman was part of a gang, the other three accomplices were near that spot, in a van, where a full surgical table was operative... They were involved, for 20 years, in body organ trading, and the girl would have ended cut up in that van.

Anyway, i hope it was a scary or interesting story (really i never go to that part of town, too isolated for me, so i did not fear that much) and i very much look forward to reading your own. They can be of your neighborhood, town, city, state or country. :)
 
Around me the only is the Bunny Man. Apparently there was an insane asylum in Clifton, Fairfax County. In 1904 the locals were scared and demanded that it be closed. They had to transport patients to some other asylum but one of the transports crashed an two guys escaped. One of the two was found hanging from a bridge while the other went missing. Later on, locals began finding mutilated bunnies near the bridge and it turns out the escaped prisoner murdered his parents on Easter and that's why he was in the asylum to begin with. Some teenagers who were hanging out near the bridge got murdered too.
Here are some pictures from wikipedia of the bridge:
Bunnyman_bridge.jpg



Bunnyman_bridge_night.jpg


Like with all urban legends, this one never happened. Historians say that there never was an insane asylum in Fairfax and none of the murders every took place either.
 
We have an old mental institution in the hood, apparently a lot of deaths and malpractice took place on the grounds. Its listed as "the most haunted location in Ontario" whatever that means. Most of the grounds have been assimilated into a local college, but one building remains forever boarded up and unoccupied. We used to break in and eff around in there in middle and high school and we saw/heard some creepy stuff.

Most of it was probably hyperactive imagination, but people are still weirded out by it, and for good reason. The inside is literally like walking on set for a horror film. Except for the graffiti, nothing has really been removed since the building was operational.
 
There are quite a few street gangs in Southern California. Some are known to be quite violent. Supposedly one of these gangs has a scary initiation ritual. Several of the members and a prospective member will drive around in a car with the headlights turned off. They look for cars driving in the opposite direction. They are looking for a car which will flash it's headlights at them. This is a courtesy that some drivers employ to alert another car that its headlights are turned off. When they find such a car they turn around and follow it. When the chance presents itself they pull alongside the other car at which point the prospective member will shoot at the other driver with an automatic weapon hoping to kill him. Law enforcement investigated these stories but could find no evidence that such a scenario actually ever happened.
 
There are quite a few street gangs in Southern California. Some are known to be quite violent

Is that why I always saw what I assume was a police helicopter in the sky when I was there, shining down a beam of light onto the ground looking for stuff?
 
Quite a few aging hippies here. One is the legendary "F-U Bob" - a tall, mangy-bearded recluse who went around giving the finger and snearing at perfect strangers. He's been kicked out of every store and eatery in Kent. Even the other disreputable bums couldn't stand him. Finaly the police picked a him up a couple of years ago after he exposed himself to some young children at McD's and got forcibly hospitalized. Now he's on his meds and no longer threatens people. But he still stalks the downtown area and is still pretty creepy.
 
None in the neck of the woods where I grew up, but apparently my mother once went with some friends down to Lawsonville to visit a house where there was this big legend.

Apparently the father had sent a child off to the store to pick up some assorted groceries and anything else that they needed. The father waited until the kid disappeared around the bend, waited a little bit longer, then pulled out a handgun and shot his wife and his other children, ended up killing himself. The kid returned after awhile, and did the typical response to finding your family murdered and bleeding on the floor and proceeded to run to the police station to report it. Estate brokers tried to pawn off the land to other people, but it was apparently cursed and anybody that bought the land and the house either left in a hurry or didn't buy the land. Eventually the place just fell into disrepair and was abandoned.

Of course my mother didn't believe a single word of it, but it turns out that the tale was true. A bunch of people down there remember the murders apparently.
 
That was the urban legend. Now the far more terrifying real event:

Sounds like a combination of two (or more) urban legends:

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/robbery/kidney.asp

Edit: ^that is one of them, the other one I had was from someone else's post)

I know, you want to believe your friend, but if he doesn't have newspaper clippings to back up his story I wouldn't believe him.
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The urban legend from my area is the several young men (college aged) who dissappear every winter (average of 1 per year). Always end up in the river after a night of drinking. Stories are a serial killer (possibly a female luring them) or a crooked cop are killing these men, when the autopsies never show any foul play, and most likely wandered across the ice due to their drunkeness and poor lighting until they fall through the ice and drown.
 
I got nothing. lol. I heard a story about there maybe being a ghost in the basement of a museum but that's about it. Could just be something I am not aware of. I imagine if there is a major urban legend about where I live it probably has to do with barbeque though.
 
There are quite a few street gangs in Southern California. Some are known to be quite violent. Supposedly one of these gangs has a scary initiation ritual. Several of the members and a prospective member will drive around in a car with the headlights turned off. They look for cars driving in the opposite direction. They are looking for a car which will flash it's headlights at them. This is a courtesy that some drivers employ to alert another car that its headlights are turned off. When they find such a car they turn around and follow it. When the chance presents itself they pull alongside the other car at which point the prospective member will shoot at the other driver with an automatic weapon hoping to kill him. Law enforcement investigated these stories but could find no evidence that such a scenario actually ever happened.

I have heard that story in London but as you said no evidence that it had actually happened.
 
i always liked the legend of augustin, the bum and street musician who, during the times the great plague hit vienna in 1679, fell into a plague pit (a pit where the plague dead where thrown into).
he was dead drunk, slept there for the night on top of the corpses, got up the next day and never contracted the plague, which is attributed to his insane levels of alcohol comsumation.


the story shows that the dysfunctional culture of alcoholism prevalent in vienna has been going on for centuries.

or, as a german once put it, the famous viennese morbidity and longing for death is just a hangover, most of the time.
 
Not exactly "urban", but here is a local legend. Around the local church there are several viking burial mounds, one of these is called "the Prince's Mound" because Charles XIV John of Sweden and Norway AKA Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte apparently had lunch on top of it once. This mound was said to contain a huge treasure, so around the turn of the century some men decided to try and dig it out. Right as they struck the earth they saw the light of flames coming from the church. They run to the church and find there is no fire. Returning to the mound they resume digging only to see the flames from the church more powerfull this time, when they run back to the church, again there is no sign of fire. Third time they keep digging, ignoring the light from the church.

Of course the church burned down then. That fire is one of the more significant events in the areas local history.
 
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