What Urban Legends do you remember from childhood?

[Palomiino]

The ones that stick in my mind are;

Supermodels harbour tapeworms as a way to keep their weight down.

Prince had a rib removed so he could give himself oral.

Various iterations of terrorist plots (IRA in the 80s) where an Irish chap told someone you know not to go to a particular shopping centre on a certain date because there was going to be a terrorist attack.

A woman driving her car was being stalked by another driver who was actually trying to warn her about an assailant on her back seat.

Poisonous spiders hidden in yukka plant
Woman getting out of car told not to turn round as mad man had husbands decapitated head and was banging it on roof of car. Tomatoes caused appendicitis and pips were killing people.

If you picked dandelions you’d wet the bed .

I remember another one about a woman who scratched her face and baby spiders came out.

Marc Almond having his stomach pumped on stage due to all the cum he'd swallowed.

Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster were the biggest ones I knew of, though some people still believe them today.

That seagulls exploded if you fed them Alka Seltzers.

If you said "Bloody Mary" into the mirror three times the creepy lady in the painting of the school library would come and get you.

Yeah i remember that one .

Razor blades in the water slides at the pool. I'm 50, and still think about it.

Where was that?

That they fed pigeons the contracrptive pill to stop them breeding .

Razor blades in everything (water slides, Halloween sweets, many more). Not even sure I’d ever seen a proper razor blade at that age!!

Jamie Lee Curtis was born a man.

Babysitter prank calls with the attacker killing the children upstairs (something about asking her to turning the kids over in their beds to reveal they’ve been stabbed).

Not an urban legend, but there was a lot of informational videos about the dangers of quicksand, which I’ve thankfully never come across!!

Omg these are hilarious 😂
I heard the one about the head on a pole, and
quicksand was always a massive worry

I didn’t know the babysitter one was an urban legend but a related one I heard was about a dog licking their owner’s hand but it turned out to be the devil or something.

I remember most of these already mentioned.

But, if you swallow chewing gum or bubble gum, it will wrap its self around your intestines and get tighter and tighter until you die.

@Palomiinoi remember my maths teacher telling us this c1989 and pretending he'd witnessed it on holiday

@Palomiinoi was referring to the spiders coming out of her face story. In my teachers version, her face suddenly swelled up on holiday and the spiders were removed under surgery!

There was one about baby crabs in unmentionable places but thankfully I can’t remember the details!

My mother truly believed this in the 1960s and probably still does. She successfully deterred me and my siblings from ever touching the stuff.

Not helped by peoole regulatly getting stuck in quick sand in flims like lassie

Back on an old defunct parenting website I used to go on, someone claimed an urban myth as something that happened to her. Basically that she hit a deer with her car and put it in the back of the car with her son but it wasn’t dead and ended up reviving and causing the predictable chaos.

Others I remember:

A woman returned a hairdryer to Argos complaining it had burned her head. It was a blow torch.

A woman got into a lift with a black man. He said “hit the floor lady” and she threw herself on the ground thinking she was being mugged. In fact he meant “press the button that corresponds to the floor you require”.
The man turned out to be Will Smith/some other famous black man.

A woman in the audience of a Chippendales performance got hit in the face with one of the performers g-strings when he lobbed it into the audience and ended up with crabs in her eyebrow.

Marc Almond having his stomach pumped after swallowing pints of semen.

Richard Gere and the gerbil.

‘Badman’ who lived on an old and extensive overgrown bombsite that we would play on after school. If he caught you he would bum you to death. (Not a typo).

Also the one about Mark Almond, which I believe was then recycled for Boy George.

That one still persists today!

There waa one about a murdered woman on a train. The gist was a man tells two teens to get off the train with him, they say no and he says theres a murderer on tje train, im trying to save you... and they realise the woman whose been across the aisle from them is dead.

My uncle actually stole a poor sheep, trapped it in his car and drove it to his rented house that currently had no occupants because he wanted it to eat the grass in his garden and was too tight to pay a gardener. I wish that really was an urban legend because it’s such a cruel thing to do when sheep are herd animals.

The well dressed business man in the multi story car park who offered to sit in a woman’s passenger seat as she drove out to deter the thugs hanging around by the exit. She comes to her senses and asks him to get out of the car to direct her out of the parking space and then floors it. Later she finds his briefcase left in the car, opens it and finds it contains only a rope and an axe.

Richard Gere stuck a hamster up his bum.