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.

I think I only remember believing the Marc Almond one and the Richard Gere one.

I remember someone saying to me that they had heard the Marc Almond one completely independent from our sources, so we concluded that made it more likely to be true 😂

I remember Al Fyed made a cringe remark during a television interview saying that when Richard Gere visited Harrods he was very interested in the Hamsters 🙄

There was an allegedly cursed house on the street where I grew up. It was totally different to all the other houses on the street. It was huge and set further back from the road. The legend goes that every family that lived in the house split up. I witnessed one myself as my best childhood friend lived there for a while until her Mum walked out, taking her 3 daughters with her. I never saw her again.

I heard somewhere that when the lead singer of Soft Cell died he had 15 different types of semen in his gut.

The rib removal to perform oral on himself that a PP mentioned about Prince, I heard the same one but about Marilyn Manson.

Went to Catholic school in the 90's and there was lots of talk about moving statues. Mostly statues of Our Lady. E.g. she has her hands in prayer and in the morning the fingers were interlocked and in the afternoons they were pointing upwards like this 🙏
Also of statues crying tears, crying blood, talking...

These used to terrify me and I hate statues even now.

Bigfoot in America
The Yeti in Nepal

Story of a girl staying home alone for the first time; there is a guard dog dog lying under / beside the bed. She keeps being woken up by a dripping sound; each time she puts her hand down the side of the bed and the dog licks it to reassure her her it's still there. After this happens a few times she goes to the bathroom and turns on the light, sees the dog has been decapitated and its head is hanging onto the lampshade. Its blood is dripping onto the floor and that is what is making the sound. Someone has written in blood on the mirror "It's not just dogs that can lick your hand".

If you swallow gum it stays in your belly for 5 yrs.

Story about a girl in Portugal who was kept in a chicken-coop and thought she was a chicken and behaved like one. (Googled this and very sadly it actually happened.)

Bloody Mary: if you say Bloody Mary into a mirror in the dark she (Mary Tudor) comes and grabs you. Also if you say your rosary in the dark in front of a mirror. Also if you just go in front of a mirror in the dark.
School loos had lights that switched off automatically so was always scary if you took too long in the cubicle 💀

Lots of stories about UFOs and people being abducted by aliens.

Vanishing Hitchhiker, turns out it was a ghost or some sort of entity.

If you picked a dandelion you would wet the bed.

If you peed in the pool the water would turn purple.

Putting a cotton reel with a strand of one blue and one red under your pillow would cure nightly growing pains.

If you died in your dream,death was imminent.

Britain still has wild panthers roaming.

Eat your crusts for curly hair (probs doesnt count)

All the babysitter ones.

We heard something similar, it was a woman going into petrol station to pay for fuel late at night and when she came back her husband’s head was on the bonnet.

I heard this about the Commie Pool in Edinburgh. They got rid of the slides but I don't think that's why...

Marc Almond ( lead singer of Soft Cell) isn't dead!

Apart from the panther and babysitter ones these aren’t urban legends, they are traditional folk superstitions.

Wasn’t there a Sun/Star/Daily Sport headline about some celeb (not Gere) putting a hamster up their bum?

The stomach pump myth was peddled about Lil Kim in the 90s.

Why are so many of these gross tales of bums, cum and sexual violence?!

I was still pushing the chewing gum strangles your guts story to my kids 10 years ago 🤣

If you peed in the pool it would release a bright red dye and an alarm would sound and everyone would know you were a dirty pool pisser.

The blue lady at a local stately home.

Freddy Starr ate my hamster?

The story I heard was... A man was staying in a creepy house just him and his dog (no idea why or whose house it was, maybe he was a caretaker or something). The dog slept by his bed and, every night before he went to sleep, he would put his hand down and the dog would lick it. One night he was awoken by a dripping sound. He found the dog with its throat cut hanging in the bathroom, the dripping was its blood. Written on the wall in blood were the words 'humans can lick too "! 😱😱😱

I spent a large part of my childhood terrified of spontaneous human combustion.

You didn’t walk over 3 drains as the IRA put bombs underneath.

Omg I’d forgotten the one about Prince!! Yes the one about someone in the back of a car - I still check the back seat at night
now!

My daughter said this to me the other day so it’s clearly still going strong 🤣

When microwaves were new, the story about an old lady who put her dog or cat into the microwave to dry it off after a wash.

One about a pet snake which kept getting out of its tank to sleep alongside its owner - it was measuring her up to see if she was an eatable size.

Me too - that and quicksand.

It was Manson with the rib. Millenial achievement. Spreading that worldwide with no social media😂

My parents were Londoners, and spoke about the legend of Spring-heeled Jack, a demonic figure who stalked the streets of nocturnal London in Victorian times.