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.

Richard Gere and the hamster/gerbil (Can’t remember which rodent it was).

If you played Like a Virgin backwards on the record player you could hear the devil talking 😂

Oh I’m so glad it’s not just me 🤣

Oh my goodness, I remember this chain mail letter!

@NolanChanceJustLikeTheWeatherNSoul I remember that one 🤣

I think this was a storyline in Grange Hill in the 80s. Terrifying!

There's also an urban myth that someone wakes up in a hotel room (somewhere foreign) in a bath of ice .
They get up to look in the mirror and see roughly sewn surgical wounds and realise their kidneys have been harvested , they were drugged, plundered and left in ice to lower the heart rate .

Or something

I remember stories about razor blades all over the bloody place - halfway down slides, hidden in sweets, taped to the tops of the monkey bars.

Razor blades, quicksand and the Bermuda triangle have thankfully not featured as prominently throughout my life as I was lead to believe.

Wasn't that Like a Prayer?

That on your first day of senior school the older kids would flush your head down the toilet. That was a real concern of mine in 1979. I was shocked to find that my DS was worried about the same thing when he started senior school c.2017.

edited to say that I’ve just seen someone else has said this above!

Someone went to the cinema and was eating a McDonald’s burger. When the lights came up the person with them screamed. They had blood running down their chin and in the burger was HALF a dead mouse.

The obligatory crap about take aways
Using seagulls
The complained about curry with copious different semen added and woman got an sti.

Swirlies in the toilet is even referenced in Harry Potter.

Dudley: They stuff your head down the toilet at Stonewall. Wanna practise?
Harry: No thanks, the toilet’s never had anything as nasty as your head down it, it might be sick.
(Flees, before Dudley can work out what he said)

Omg my mum used to tell the lift story about a woman she knew! And that it was Eddie Murphy!

Me too! I had a book with lots of pictures of one foot next to the two-bar heater, I can remember it clearly as day. God knows why my parents let me read it. I really thought people just randomly burst into flames 😆

My mum told me that someone once found a dead mouse in their sliced bread, with a bit of mouse in each slice.

In our version of the ‘woman gets out of car and told not to look backwards’ it was a crazed monkey bouncing the husbands head on the roof of the car.

if you swallow chewing gum it wraps around your HEART a thousand times and you die, which even as a child I knew made no sense but I would still never swallow chewing gum.

I’ve just said to my husband about spontaneous human combustion being a myth and he swears it’s true! Worryingly the man is a paramedic??? And an ex-fireman!!
I’ve just googled it to prove it to him. He’s looking a bit sheepish!

there was one about someone being so stressed in an exam they put a pencil in each nose and slammed their head on the table amd the pencils went into their brain and killed them. i was really traumatised by this until i moved schools to a different part of the country and heard the same rumour about a different school!

Yep, this was said about Richmond waterslides in SW London - the idea terrified me!

Wasn't that the lad from the Frosties advert? "They're gonna taste great"

Purple Aki.

That if you eat 2 packs of space dust your stomach will explode

I swear he was real. https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2025-08-27/liverpool-bodybuilder-akinwale-arobieke-confirmed-dead

its even true about the boy who died after Aki tried to touch him

https://rjrileywrites.medium.com/muscles-manslaughter-the-true-story-of-purple-aki-ef06f7e484ab

Another one -
Friend of my sister went into a late night chicken bar " can I have a chicken burger,ketchup,no mayonnaise, regular chips please "
Get home take a bite . Eurgh mayonnaise.
Puts it aside goes to bed.
Feels ill , takes the burger to be looked at . Not mayonnaise it's an abscess off the chicken

Of course this is TRUE, it's not as though chicken burger meat is all ,inced up or anything....

Every swimming pool in the country should put a sign up saying this is in fact what happens lol. Especially at our local council pool which apparently smells of wee.

Wasn’t he bummed to death hence the amount of semen in his stomach?! 🤣