Every city has its own set of secrets and stories lurking behind the touristy attractions. From places that few dare to visit after dark, to legends and myths passed down through generations…
Maybe there’s a haunted bridge, a mysterious woman in white, or a headless hitchhiker that locals swear they’ve spotted on the highway at midnight.
Urban legends and ghost stories have a way of turning ordinary hometowns into creepy places fit for the scariest of Halloween celebrations. Someone asked, “What’s a local urban legend or ghost story unique to your town?” and the answers came flying in faster than witches in the night. From the “Crucified Cat” to “Sarah’s Grave,” people have been letting their local skeletons out of the closet.
Bored Panda has put together a list of the spookiest “I swear it’s true” stories for you to scroll through when the clock strikes 12. So sit back, dim the lights and prepare for a haunting trip around the world, and don’t forget to upvote your favorites. P.S. You’ll find some bonus tales between the images.
#1
Bulgarian here, living people being walled up in every single piece of construction, built before the outbreak of science on our territory. Oh, that nice bridge you’re standing on? There’s prob a skeleton inside it. (It was believed a sacrifice was necessary).
Image source: DaChosenOne777, Anton Atanasov
#2
Okay, I’m from Colombia and in the small city I live in there is this urban legend called “Los niños dulce” or The Candy/Sweet kids. The legend says that there was an orphanage in a mountain many, many years ago that burned down. And all the kids died there. If you go at midnight in your car to that mountain with flour and candy and you spread flour in the hood of your car, then put the candy in the hood as well, get into the car and lock all the doors, you first will hear children lullabies and you will feel as if someone is on top of the hood of your car. When all that passes, if you get out, you can see the imprint of hands and feet children size in the flour and some of the candy missing,.
Image source: Newsalem777, fijulanam468
#3
Sarah’s Grave. Headstone in the middle of the oil fields, and it’s partially sunken in. You’re supposed to go lay in it at night and she might pull you down.
Image source: SweetCosmicPope, Kenny Orr
#4
We have a lake named Witchduck because they used to drown women there in the 1700’s who were suspected of being ‘witches’.
Image source: anon, Ales Krivec
#5
Southern NJ, we have the legend of the Jersey Devil. In the mid 1700’s, Mother Leeds already had 12 children. After finding out she was pregnant again with her thirteenth child, she cursed this child and declared he would be the devil. The child looked normal at birth but soon after transformed into a monster with hooves, bat wings, a forked tail and a goats head. There have been many reported sightings. The funny thing is that the local indians also had a legend of a similar creature that inhabited the area long before the Leeds family moved in.
Image source: Chickadee12345
#6
In Oceanside CA, there was a “witch” that lived alone in a decrepit house in a decent neighborhood. My older sister would always tell us about her when we were passing the street we lived on. One day she says “you want to go see her house?” So we made the turn on her street and there she was, just standing and staring at her house. My sister freaked out and sped off as soon as we saw her. I went back a few years later and I assumed she died because there was a completely new house built where here house was. I looked up to see what I could find about her, people would bother her and ding dong ditch her too. I guess ever since her daughter died she became a recluse and never liked when people visited her.
Image source: gtino195, Thirdman
#7
I lived kind of nearby and vacationed there. Pawley’s Island has the Grey Man.
Basically a ghost you’ll see on the beach shortly before a hurricane. If you see him your house will be fine, but all your neighbors’ houses will be flattened.
Image source: ZarquonsFlatTire, High Tide Content
#8
We have the classic Cry Baby Bridge legend as usual.
The baby got hit by a car in that bridge pretty much Halloween. So once its Halloween at night and you go across Cry Baby Bridge you’d hear the kids cry during that night.
Image source: L3go07, Josh Hild
#9
Bailey’s Ghost Light
James Brit Bailey was an original Texas settler, who got here from North Carolina before Stephen F Austin came. His property is now known as Bailey’s Prairie.
He was said to be a real troublemaker, constantly getting into disputes, and brawls.
When he died of cholera in 1832, he had demanded in his will to be buried standing straight up, facing West, with his jug of whiskey at his feet, and his rifle at his side.
Legend has it that the slaves that dug his grave stole his jug of whiskey, or in other versions, his wife took it away. Either way, he was deprived of his cherished beverage.
Now, on cold dark nights a light can sometimes be seen out in the fields of Bailey’s Prairie, said to be old Brit looking for his stolen jug of whiskey. The light has been known to chase people and cars, and will disappear as suddenly as it appeared.
There’s a really good book called Ghosts Along the Brazos that was written by a local historian full of these small town Texas folklore and stories.
Image source: Mistercleaner1, Nigel Hoare
#10
My dad swore this happened to him and his brother. They were walking down a dirt road at night, and were passed by 3 ghost dogs, one growling one whimpering and one barking. He said his dad told him it was the ghosts of 3 local guys, two always fighting and one always whining, to the point where now their ghosts haunt the area.
Image source: Excellent_Rest_8008, Tarikul Raana
#11
The headless football player. There’s an old railroad junction that’s said to be haunted. The story of the death really happened. I went to school with the guy, he was 3 grades ahead of me. It was about 28 years ago.
One of our football players was having some mental health issues. He fumbled a play and some people in the stands laughed at him. He stormed off the field and took off to the old railroad junction. It was a popular place for teens to hang out and drink, and it was well known that the cops wouldn’t bother you out there so long as you stayed out of trouble. He got blackout drunk and passed out leaned on the tracks. Never heard the train coming. The next morning they found his truck, a bunch of liquor bottles, and his headless corpse. They never found his head. Legend is if you go out there to the old junction on a crisp fall night, you’ll see his ghost wandering around in the weeds, still searching for his missing head.
Image source: zorggalacticus, Thirdman
#12
Indian here.
In the Capital of India (New Delhi) there’s been an urban legend for a particular borough of the City.
It’s called Delhi Cantonment area. The urban legend goes like this-
Once, there was a Mother with her child. She was once crossing the street at night, and was unfortunately run over by a Vehicle (different versions have different vehicles).
She was flung away from her child. She crawled to her child, only to find out he has passed away. She died before she could even reach him.
It is said that her Spirit haunts that area starting from 11 p.m.
A friend told me a story that happened with his uncle there~
His Uncle was driving a Scooter (like a moped) at night, going back home from work. He saw a Lady, who gestured for a lift. He stopped besides her and asked her. She told him that she needed lift till her neighbourhood. He agreed since he just wanted to help a lady out in need. After some distance, she asked him to drop her. He wished her goodnight, and went on his way. After some distance, he spotted another Lady asking for a lift. That lady was also wearing a Sari (Traditional Drape), but he couldn’t recognise her face. She told him the same thing, and he helped “another” person. Again, he wished her goodnight, and went on his way. While driving away, he had a cold shiver running down his spine. The realisation was starting to dawn over him, but hadn’t quite yet.
After some distance, he saw a lady again, asking for a lift. But this time, he pretended to not see her and kept driving. He kinda increased his speed a bit to hurry home sooner. After some distance, something caught his Peripheral vision. He turned his head on his side, to see the same woman running parallel beside him. She was looking straight in his eyes with a huge grin on her face. He was so shell shocked, he twisted his wrist, and went full acceleration at around 100 kmph. After some moments he went unconscious.
When he woke up, it was around 5:30 a.m. or so, the sun was coming out, and there was a person who woke him up. He asked him if he was okay. The person told him that he found him laying on the footpath besides his scooter. He asked him whether he met with an accident or something. My friend’s uncle looked around, and bite mark wounds on his Thigh and calves. He had bled, but it was dry now (the blood had clotted already). He found scratches on his helmet, and some damage to the scooter.
He never took that route at night.
So yeah, that was kind of a crazy story.
Image source: anon, Farzad Sedaghat
#13
A story from Bengal, India. There’s an spirit known as nishir daak, or ” call of the night ”
The story goes around basically that the spirit goes around at nights and knocks at doors. It mimicks your loved one’s voices or your friends voices, and asks to open the door. Whoever does open it, dies.
However there is a way to escape it’s hunt. The Nishi only knocks 3 times. So if someone knocks at your door late night, people have the habit of waiting for the 4th knock.
Beware if you ever step foot in india, and at night if someone knocks at your door. It might be the Nishi.
Image source: Darth_Doomslayer, 林生 黄
#14
Here in Poland, there was the legend of a “Black Volga”. It was basically a black volga car with white tires, driven by (depending from the source) nuns, priests, jews, russian mafia, satanists or even satan. It would kidnap kids, drain off blood from their bodies, and sell it as a cure for leukemia to rich Germans.
Image source: A_random_redditor21, Vitali Adutskevich
#15
We had a library in town (now demolished) that everyone would go to during halloween to see the “crucified cat”. I have no idea why anyone thought it’d be in there, or how the rumor got started but it was basically a rite of passage to see it.
But, the library actually had a pretty legit security system. On the outside windows, there were either motion sensors or *something* that caused a super loud alarm to go off if you stood next to a window for however long or put pressure on the glass I think? (this was 15+ years ago)
Regardless, you’d bring your friend / younger sibling to see it, and tell them to look into the basement window. After a minute of trying to find it a loud alarm would go off and scare the lights out of them. Good times were had.
edit: my husband reminded me of another one: there was a “ghost hitchhiker” that would walk a road going along the big cliffs on one side of the city. Turns out the ghost was just some dude who liked night walks and got f*****g tired of stupid kids, so he yell at them when they’d slow down to try and see him. Pretty sure he eventually passed away / stopped going on walks, so the legend died out.
Image source: jaded-limit, Dionisvero
#16
I live in Silicon Valley, which used to be all farmland. There’s a(or used to be) a Toy’s R Us toy store on land where a farmer died violently, and that store had a well known poltergeist issue. It was a pretty famous feature of the store.
Image source: badideas1
#17
Grew up in a small rural village and there was a story that dated from around the 16 or 1700s called the “Witch of Winterslow”.
The legend goes that farmers hunting animals like hares or foxes would find that as their dogs were about to make a k**l, a large white hare would suddenly appear out of nowhere and lead the dogs astray, with neither the hunting dogs, their prey nor the white hare ever being seen again. This happened so many times that the village began to run out of hunting dogs and the local village vicar suspected that witchcraft was at play, so he fashioned a custom-made bullet forged out of a silver coin and joined a hunt and when the white hare appeared, he shot it.
The white hare was hit by the silver bullet but was not k****d outright, instead being mortally injured and jumping into a thicket and disappearing before the hunting party could catch up to it. When the hunting party returned to back to the village, they found it in a state of drama, because a local lady called Lydia Shears had been found shot in her cottage and was bleeding out badly. The woman died as a barber-surgeon attempted to extract the bullet from her but as he did, it turned out to not only be the exact same bullet that the vicar had shot the magic hare with, but the lady had been shot in the exact same part of her body as the hare!
After that day, there were no more appearances of the white hare, so people supposed that Lady Lydia was in fact the Witch of Winterslow and that the white hare had been one of her transformations.
Image source: Creative_Recover
#18
The young lady of the highway. I remember this story from my grade school years and people swore to it long after that.
Near Greentown PA there was a story of a young woman in a long green (no coincidence) cape who would flag down highway travelers for a ride, always on a stormy/wintry night.
She supposedly would ask them to drive to her parents’ house– a remote and modest home near NewFoundland in NorthEast PA.
And, when the travelers would arrive there, she would somehow slip out of their car leaving a wet puddle from ice/rain in the backseat .
But, once the travelers would get inside and meet/greet the elderly parents over a cup of tea, they would learn that the young woman had died at least a decade ago in a car crash or some such other tragedy on the highway.
To refute the traveler’s shock and disbelief, the elderly parents would open a cabinet and show as proof a dry and dusty old green cape that their late daughter had worn the night of her death.
Image source: anon, Aliaksei Antropau
#19
The Pedro Mountain mummy in Wyoming. Some miners found a dwarf mummy in a cave. They were never really able to figure out what I was, an adult dwarf or maybe a child. It bounced around between scientists and carnival side shows and disappeared sometime in the 60s. Local Native American lore talks of a race of little people.
Image source: HarveyMushman72
#20
We had a man that would hide in the woods with a pillowcase on his head. I was in elementary school and I just remember that we weren’t allowed to play on the field near the woods for a couple weeks. I even remember going trick or treating with my brother and sister and mom and a police car pulled up to check out our costumes and my mom and the cop talking about the “pillowcase man”. I remember the cop telling us not to worry about him, but then my mom and the cop talked about it for like 5 minutes while we walked to the next house.
Maybe this is an urban legend in other towns, but the whole thing reminded me of an 80’s horror movie.
Image source: CBus-Eagle
#21
In the 19teens, 1914 I think, a woman from my home town moved home from the city to take care of her mother. A man, who was a friend of hers, followed her. It’s not clear if they were already romantically involved, but he had intention to propose. He packed up all of his possessions and money and showed up on the doorstep of her family’s home. They welcomed him in, and gave him a place to stay for the night. That night, he proposed and was rejected. He was enraged and slashed her throat with a straight razor. Then, he fled into the night with nothing but his night clothes and his razor.
The police tore apart the countryside looking for him, the village was on edge, at one point, the police chased a local teenager for hours because he matched the description (the kid had snuck out of the house in his night shirt to steal a watermelon and believed that was why the police were pursuing him). This went on for several weeks, expanding into the rest of the county and beyond.
A couple of weeks later, a local farmer noticed his horse was missing. He was checking a neighbors fence line on the edge of a swampy hollow, thinking his horse had escaped to visit hers, when he found the decapitated corpse of the killer. He had cut his own throat with his razor the way through (the bugs and animals had done the rest) on the night of the m****r. He had been lying dead no more than a few hundred yards from the scene of the crime for two weeks. We still call that sunken swampy area Dead Man’s Hollow.
Image source: endless-reproachment
#22
The Screaming Tunnel (Niagara Falls, Ontario). Originally built in the 1800’s under the main line of the Grand Trunk Railroad so farmers and cattle could bypass the tracks safely, it’s said that the spirit of a girl who burned to death haunts the tunnel and her screams can be heard echoing through it. David Cronenberg used the tunnel as a filming location for his 1983 film *The Dead Zone*.
Image source: Flying_Dustbin
#23
A park a five minute walk from my childhood home, and surrounding houses were used as a hiding place for a dismembered corpse about 20 years ago. I think the head was found in the park bushes by a dog walker. Killer was quickly caught after trying to flee the country but it led to a few local ghost stories.
Image source: Isabelle_K
#24
The town where I grew up had actual recorded cases of vampires. In truth, it was a family who had tuberculosis but, at the time the people in town feared that the family members who passed away would come back from their graves to cause the others to become ill. Eventually the towns people dug up the bodies of the deceased, and separated the bones, or burned what was left of the bodies.
Image source: DarkWolfWarrior101
#25
I’m from Vermont, and this is more of a state wide thing. But there’s always stories about how lake Champlain has a Loch Ness monster type cryptid in it, who’s name is Champ. I think the most recent “sighting” was a few years ago? He’s even made it into a nature/science museum by the lake!
Image source: Good-Contact1520
#26
I’m not sure if I remember this story exactly, but it goes like this: I’m from a very old, very small town south of Boston. There is a house near the center of town. It’s round. Sort of like a stout cylinder. The “legend” is that the original owner either believed or was told that the devil would get him one day. In a corner. So he built an entirely round house out of fear. Legend says he died in the garage. Which was square.
ETA: I think people used to say he still haunts the property.
Image source: anon
#27
The park that used to be a cemetery. Bodies were exhumed to make room for the park, and one man was caught using small caskets full of dismembered parts to get extra pay from the city. They never finished the job, soooo if you ever go to Cheesman Park, you’re probably walking over lots of unmarked graves.
Image source: angryaxolotls
#28
I live next town over from the Amityville Horror house
my town is now known for the Gilgo Beach Killer . I live one block over and three blocks down from him. My son went to school with his daughter. It was so creepy when they arested him.
Image source: Seuss221
#29
Goatman’s Bridge
I’m going to copy and paste what Wikipedia says because it’s hard to explain.
“it is said to be haunted by a half-man half-goat figure called Goatman. The belief is based on the legend of a black goat farmer named Oscar Washburn, who was said to have moved his family to a residence just north of the bridge. A few years later, Washburn, having become known as a dependable and honest businessman and dubbed the “Goatman” by locals, displayed a sign on Alton Bridge reading “This way to the Goatman”. But the success of a black man was still unwelcome to many, and, in August 1938, Klansmen in the local government crossed the bridge and kidnapped Washburn from his family. They hung a noose on Old Alton Bridge and, after securing it around his neck, threw him over the side. When they looked down to see if he had died, the noose was empty. In a panic, they returned to his family home and slaughtered his wife and children”
In my city, animal shelters don’t house or adopt out black cats anymore because many people will go out to Goatman’s bridge to sacrifice the cats. There have been a few deaths over the past few years as well. Kids have jumped off the bridge into a VERY shallow river and dead on impact along with kids being “pushed” off the bridge. There has been no signs of foul play in the deaths of those who were pushed off though. There has been an episode regarding Goatman’s Bridge from Buzzfeed Unsolved and Ghost Adventures. I recommend watching those.
Funny enough, there’s a trail in Goatman’s area and if you go far enough, you’ll find a random couch and that’s where all the high school and college kids go to smoke weed. There’s also a rundown old salon and country like buildings on the trail too. At night, it’s super creepy and you get this sense of “something’s not right”. The trail is very pretty though.
Image source: flipflamtap
#30
NJ, here.
The New Jersey Pinelands is home to miles of pine trees and sandy roads, but it is also home to New Jersey’s most infamous resident… The Jersey Devil. Designated in 1938 as the country’s only state demon, the Jersey Devil is described as a kangaroo-like creature with the face of a horse, the head of a dog, bat-like wings, horns and a tail. For more than 250 years this mysterious creature is said to prowl through the marshes of Southern New Jersey and emerge periodically to rampage through the towns and cities.
Somber Beauty by Phil Domitrowsky
Help Protect the Land of the Legend!
Help us ensure that the forests, rivers and swamps that inspired the legend of the Jersey Devil remain protected for future generations of believers.
The most widely held belief about the origin of the Jersey Devil is that Mrs. Leeds, a resident of Estellville, was distraught when she learned she was expecting for the thirteenth time. In disgust, she cried out, “Let it be the devil!” The story continues that the child arrived and it was a baby devil. The creature then gave a screech unfolded its wings and flew out the window and into the adjacent swamp.
Image source: VeterinarianOk9223
#31
In the mid 1700s, the Emperor of Austria supposedly bestowed a golden chalice to a particularly pious religious order in my town. The leader of this order felt the gift was too worldly and hid it in the cave system that runs under our town. The chalice has never been found.
The cave/ tunnel system lore also pops up on the Nextdoor app. There is a very small, very vocal group of residents that swear the federal government is using the cave system to hide things… like aliens. I genuinely can not tell if these people truly believe in this conspiracy story or if they are practicing their creative writing skills. Either way, it’s incredibly entertaining.
Image source: Timid0ctopus
#32
There’s supposedly a Vampire the next town over from the town I went to college in. Sometime in the early 1900s, a dude from Transylvania died and was buried in the town cemetery. People noticed that his grave says he was born in Transylvania so naturally they assumed he was a vampire. So they dug him up, put a stake through his heart, and re-buried him. But some still say late at night they see a man in a cloak roaming the streets of Lafayette, Colorado.
Image source: Fletcherdl
#33
Filipino Here, This folklore just makes me scared to go out at night alone.
The tikwi is a creature that makes sounds in the night, it rips it’s other half of its body at night and then fly to look for victims.
It makes sound like “Tikwi!”, what makes this creature’s victims think they are safe is that they make their sounds fainter and fainter to make it sound like they are now far away from the creature, but it’s the opposite the father away they sound the closer they are to their victims.
Image source: Little_Quest
#34
I’m Irish so the closest thing to a ghost/spirit was a Banshee. It was said that the banshees wails could be heard at night and it usually meant whoever heard the wails was close to death or there would be a death in that persons family.
Image source: tomthetrucker93
#35
Here in Kentucky, we have a supposed ghost at a university called the Blue Lady Ghost. There’s a plaque dedicated to it in front of the building and everything.
The story goes that there was a young university drama teacher, who was cheated on by her lover. She was so upset that she hung herself at the bell tower of a building on campus. They say you can see her sometimes at night and she comes out when the wind starts to blow forcefully (at least that’s what I’ve heard). When I was a kid and used to go on walks with my dad on campus, we would search for her. I remember trying to see between the curtains just for a glimpse of her.
Image source: Pooter8598
#36
The rougaroux! Basically a Swamp werewolf in Cajun lore.
Image source: TheSocialABALady
#37
Nain Rouge. The hobgoblin of the early French settlement of Detroit.
Image source: Voodoo330
#38
Gravity Hill in SLC, Utah. I grew up in the city and there were always stories of Gravity Hill behind the Capitol building. The story was that a girl was m******d at the bottom of the hill some time ago and she tries to help people escape the same fate.
Supposedly if you cover the rear of your car in powder or something similar and place your car in neutral when heading up hill your car will roll upwards instead of back down. After you get out of the area and inspect the rear of your car you’re suppose to see a set of hand prints I printed in the baby powder or whatever you used.
I tried this once and didn’t see any hand prints… however the rolling uphill instead of back down while on neutral actually did happen, which was wild af to experience tbh.
Image source: -Glostiik-
#39
My local former Sears/current sketchy furniture store’s second floor has long been rumoured to be haunted by a former employee who would appear every once in a while to chat with people. That store always had strange vibes, even back when Sears was doing okay.
Image source: punkterminator
#40
Bartonville, IL used to have a state-run Mental Assylum. One of the residents was deaf and mute. They didn’t have paperwork on the man, and he couldn’t communicate it to them. So, the site administrator recorded his name as “A. Bookbinder”. Everyone called him Old Book. Whenever someone at the facility died, Old Book would lean against a tree in the cemetery and weep loudly until the service was over.
In the course of time, Old Book himself died. As they lowered his body into the ground, a loud weeping noise was heard coming from the oak tree nearby. This event was witnessed by dozens of medical professionals who were on staff at the assylum. It is one of the most well-documented hauntings in the state of IL.
Image source: ichristosmith
#41
The conjuring house in Burrillville , Rhode Island
Not from RI but grew up in the next state over.
Image source: anon
#42
The Ghost of Proctor Park:
Local legend had it that there was an armed robbery suspect who fled the scene and the police finally cornered him in front of a concrete wall at Proctor Park. He raised his gun and police shot him, and he slammed up against the wall and died. On certain nights, you could look at the wall where he had been k****d. You could see his silhouette on the wall. It was known as the Ghost of Proctor Park. After hearing the story from a co-worker, my friends and I drove over to the park one night and we saw the haunted silhouette on the wall. We all panicked in terror, and fled the scene hoping that the ghost would not follow us.
A few days later, the guy who told the story drove us back to Proctor Park during daytime. When we got to the wall, the ghost was still there! Because it was a spray painted silhouette on the concrete wall.
Image source: Maldibus
#43
City I grew up in a city that was supposed to missle silo just out of town. Everyone always talk about the Satanist that gather there sacrifice animals to Satan. Yes this was the 80’s. As far as I know then only close to that was and old decommissioned arsenal. That the government kept everyone a way from. Yeah dumb bored teens we drive all over and never found a silo.
Image source: Muppet0242
#44
I don’t have anything to add in particular, but I do find it humorous that it seems like every town has the urban legend of the ghost kids on the railroad tracks. It’s always the setup being that the kids died because they got stuck at the railroad crossing and a train hit the school bus. Every story always has the same method of testing the urban legend by stopping at the crossing and putting your car into neutral with the idea that the car will move forward on it’s own and there will be tiny handprints that appear on the back bumper of your car once you’re safely off the tracks.
Image source: anon
#45
The Rougarou, a wolf-like creature who lives in the swamps of Louisiana. We have a festival in his name every October.
Image source: MindlessBenefit9127
#46
There’s a myth in the town I live in of a man who lives in the trees who eats squirrels and birds, but has a particular taste for young kids. Bassically the legend goes that his name was Johnny Redswik and he turned to the lifestyle one fateful Halloween night. Has it as legends go that some Halloween nights you
Can see him in the trees awaiting his next victim.
Image source: Geekandfreaklol
#47
There’s a ghost haunting an old building turned shop, and he “feels up” the women who work in the shop. In that same building, it used to be a doctors house in the 17/1800s, and he would take in homeless people to “treat” them, but their organs were found in jars in the basement.
Image source: Extension_Payment525
#48
Here in México we have a ghost story wherever you go. Not any city, I guarantee you that every neighborhood has some kind of haunted house, building or place.
The creepiest I knew was “La Niña del Parque Héroes” (the Girl from the “Héroes” Park), in Aguascalientes, México. As the name implies, she’s the ghost of a little girl who appears in the night. She just asks you if you want to play with her…
…while holding her head with her two hands.
Image source: CharlyVazquez
#49
The Tennessee wildman. Basically either a Bigfoot or in some versions a feral human that is pushing 7-8 feet tall. Legend has it that a carnival barker in the early 1900s caught him in a cage and was putting him on display until he broke out and got away.
A lot of the rumors are from East Tennessee near the smokies. I’ve also heard that, during the civil war some families decided they didn’t want to fight and retreated into the mountains far away from where the army could come find them, and over time have reverted to being feral humans (assumed in-breeding has made recessive genes very prominent, making them large and hairy).
A Josh Gates expedition on Expedition X found human hair in a cave near some small animal bones that had been torn apart, and their decision was basically just “yeah, sometimes people just decide to go live in the wilderness and go wild)”. Some park rangers in the smokies will candidly tell you they believe it too. There were a couple of sightings during the 80s, of a large hairy red eyed bipedal human like thing grabbing farm animals and running off into the woods with them, and a few years ago a couple hiking in the Appalachian’s on the North Carolina side of the smokies said they saw something similar. One of the families near where Dennis Martin went missing also said they saw a huge hairy man with a kid under his arm running straight up a near vertical cliff shortly after Dennis went missing as well.
Image source: PerInception
#50
Italian here, in Milan there was a legitimate beast that ate children and terrorized in the 1790s. it has no name. just called the ferocious beast, and its body was on display but went missing post ww2. no records since. it was supposedly ‘wolf-like’.
Image source: anon
#51
When I lived in Texas I was near one of many goat man bridge. It was a rusty bridge connecting a small big city and an abandoned town. It is rumored to have a goat man there who hunts every night from 11:00-4:00am. So, there are no houses within a 3 mile radius. There are cults and many sacrifices there. If you are looking for it. I can tell you where.
Image source: Lucky_Irish_Man08
#52
Growing up, I was told a LOT of stories about the legend of sleepy hollow. The story is about the ghost known as the headless horseman. The stories said that you should never stay out past midnight at the church of sleepy hollow, and if you did, the ghost would chase after you carrying his head in his arms and he wouldn’t stop unless you made it past the creaky church bridge. this may or may not have made me very paranoid.
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#53
Probably Bunyips, from Australian folklore
Large ominous creatures that lurk underwater near the water’s edge, and it actively will hunt and k**l nearby people,
Reports of it being a large dark seal like creature
Sightings trace way back to the Aboriginals of the land in their stories, with bunyip meaning devil in their language
Reports grew by the hundreds when Europeans came to Australia , with many officials and escaped convicts all reporting independently their experience with seeing and hearing about the bunyip,
Either that or the min min lights, which are massive orbs of lights following people around in the wilderness, running away, and illuminating things around them so it’s not a hallucination!
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#54
I hope this isn’t already posted here but my country Chile is large and long with a plenty of pretty scary folktales and creepy stories. Most of it’s inhabitants live in Región Metropolitana where our main city is located (roghly a third part of our poppulation) to the north is desert, mid zone is mediterranean weather and south is forest, lakes and cold weathers.
The most present myth in our country should be the ones that comes from the south, where the witches flies up in the skies turned into a flaming heads or takes the form of a chon chon (heads of witches that uses its ears as wings) or even a tuetue, a bird that is in fact a witch who pays you a visit and expect you to give him/her a drink of tea.
There is a lot of myths too about Saint John’s eve, i think this is near the winter solstice and it is said that the devil appears bellow fig trees and i think i’ve heard once that he teaches you how to play guitar if you find it (maybe this last one i am mading up, i can’t search it rn).
My most favorite myth consideing how scary i remember it was when i first heard of it would probably be the story of invunche, a creature that lives in Chiloe that is in fact a human malformed by witches, they have turned his head and his limbs, attached a leg to his back and his tounge is slashed trough the center so he has a serpent like tounge. I remember hear that the invunche lived in a cave eating human corpses but Wikipedia says that he is like the guard of witch caves and the process of making one implies that a witch should take a first born, break it’s limbs and tounge, attach a leg at his back head with salves and feed him up with children’s meat when young and adult’s meat when adult.
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#55
I lived in Honduras for a year and my cousins told me about La Siguanava (i think that’s how you spell it) well apparently its a super attractive woman that appears in wooded areas. She entices you to follow her to sleep with her and only appears to teen boys and men. She then would turn to a horrid demon and eat you. Lots of men and teen boys actually would go missing in the village. I never knew if it was true or not.
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#56
We Egyptians don’t do much folklore.
The scariest one is of a guy called “The man with the boiled leg”
It’s a thing all Egyptian parents have universally agreed to tell to their misbehaving kids like “go to sleep or the man with the boiled leg will come after you”
Some creative parents expanded his lore but nothing official.
But if somebody wanted to make a horror movie out of him. My god it might be actually horrifying with good writing and design.
Edit: I’ve done more digging around and found popular yet not as common as the boiled leg. There’s El Nadaha, which translates to The Caller. It’s basically just an average siren.
There’s also a real one called El Sala’wa, it’s a wolf/stray dog hybrid that farmers fear and tell stories about and how it kidnaps children to eat them with their pack.
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