Urban Legends.

[LordOfThe5Rings]

I know I've been hogging the boards the last few days, but I don't care :P Just been curious on other peoples opinions on things.

I didn't know where to put this, so I apologise if it's in the wrong category.

I was wondering what everyones favourite Urban Legend/Cautionary Tale was. I have been fascinated in them for pretty much forever, due to so many meanings and of course expressing the nations fears.

So what are your favourites? Feel free to share the UL with us! :)

Thanks to a combination of extreme tiredness and reading links from this thread far too late at night, I had visual and auditory hallucinations last night while I was in bed (waking dreams, I suppose). The worst was hearing my toddler DD screaming for me and calling for help, but when I ran into her room she was fast asleep, and perfectly peaceful . The other stuff was shadowy figures with claw-hands that reached for me in the night, and whispered odd stuff at me but that I could handle. DH was less than impressed though, I kept jolting awake and sitting bolt upright. Poor bloke

Pregnancy is totally the worst for vivid dreams anyway, god knows what I was thinking when I read all that stuff!

whatkungfu I know someone who regularly pulls those sort of stunts on his friends and family, and films it on his phone . His favourite target is his dad. I suspect that one day he won't have the 'hilarious' response he expects as his dad is getting on a bit and has heart problems...

I hope you gave your DP a good telling off!

I heard a weird one from my friend.. not scary, but it made me a bit
Someone she knew had moved with her DH and family into an end terrace with an empty property next door. After they'd been living there a couple of months, a middle-aged couple moved in to the empty house. They were a little odd, but very polite, always stopping to say hello and have a chat over the fence and there were no noise issues at all. They never heard a single noise from next door. Woman and her DH assumed the terrace walls must be unusually thick and carried on with their (noisy) family life.
A year after they moved in, the man and his wife moved out without a word and the house was re-let. The first day that the new tenants moved in, the woman's family were horrified to realise that they could hear every word of their new neighbors' conversations, hear the telephone ringing, footsteps etc. The walls were, in fact, paper thin, so not only had the old neighbors lived in silence, they had been eavesdropping on the woman's family life every day, and never said anything.

Oh, and this thread has shit me up. I daren't go put a wash on in the creepy, dark cellar now.

Thank you! I knew I hadn't imagined that 'Fear' programme. No one else seems to remember it. Didn't the producers do things like hang stuff from the ceiling just to freak the contestants out even more?

Yes, Sausage! I remember one in an asylum where the guy walked into a room and there was what looked like someone hanging upside down. The producers definitely tampered with the locations to up the scares. It scared me silly but I still had to watch it...Why?! Why couldn't I just switch over?!

Smegs its typical of him.

I mentioned upthread that DP used to work in what was an old asylum just up the road (and the weirdest thing he saw was Ian Hislop when he was filming). Its a housing estate now and the original buildings have been turned into trendy and expensive apartments. I often wonder if the people who bought the sweet little detached bungalow in the grounds had any idea it used to be the mortuary.

There is (or was) a restaurant in Vienna which had a mortuary slab in the lobby. It held a huge flower arrangement.

Never figured out why.

University College, Durham is based in the 11th century castle, and a lot of the student's accommodation is in the Keep (rebuilt in the 1830's after being in ruins for ages). I had some friends at the college, and they used to talk in hushed tones about the former student who would occasionally fling herself from the top of the Keep in a ghostly suicide bid.

None of them ever saw her, and I always wondered one of the few legends such an ancient castle could produce was quite modern, given that Castle college only started admitting female students in 1987!

I think the main castle has a ghost as well, although most people who claimed to see her were attending the famously debauched balls at the college and therefore not particularly reliable

Oooh, link to fear programme, please?

[if there is a trace of it left.]

Oh I used to have a friend who would do that, he was ridiculous. He'd hide spiders somewhere on you, put 'fake' blood on himself and pretend he was bit by a snake etc etc, v v horrible really. Nasty wee shit, we aren't friends anymore!!!

www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=old%20mtv%20shows-fear&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CFQQtwIwAg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DiPKyT7ALK-4&ei=7FQrUKTkMMqb0QWQvIGYDA&usg=AFQjCNHFN8X4cF9BFPtOf5fHWoUQVBUICQ

Or just search YouTube 'MTV Fear episodes' and there's a few. Haven't watched them all as am currently watching a bit of cbeebies to balance out all the horror I've been reading on here! I know, big wuss...

Oooh okay, thanks

Don't let this thread die! I'm enjoying it too much even if it is shitting me up

I have rashly allowed myself to be talked into a few days (or a week) in a barn conversion in bum-feck nowhere. Won't be thinking about this thread at all

First recorded RL case of someone going on holiday by mistake!

We don't want a rabbit, we want a pheasant.

I was worried about looking out a dark landscape and seeing a stickman. Until now.

FWIW its a very nice barn but the bedrooms are downstairs DP has talked me into it as it is cheap has lots of fishing for the DS's to do.

Lemarch I think it housed chickens rather than cows

Anyone watching the Hotel Inspector? The USP of this hotel is that it's haunted! They've got a whole Halloween-tat thing going on, it's horrific. The 'pumpkin' looks like it's made of plasticine!.

It's quite sad actually, I grew up near St Albans and it always looked like a nice hotel from the outside. It's clearly very old, and a very beautiful building. It could well be haunted although I actually don't believe in ghosts but it's all overshadowed by the utter crapness of the marketing and presentation!