Top 10 Urban Legends That Are Actually True
Urban legends are relatively young, at least in the sense that the phrase has been used to refer to them. Although they exist in a wide variety of styles and ... read more...genres, the name dates back to the 1960s, and the fundamental concept is the same. It's a tale that is recounted as if it were real. The specifics are frequently adjusted to make it appear more personal; it happened in your town or close by, and individuals you know or may have heard of were involved. But generally speaking, the assumption is that it is a myth or a legend, a tale meant to horrify or shock in some way. Not true, though. Here are some Urban Legends That Are Actually True.
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The urban legend about organ theft is so well-known that it has been featured in films. Although most people are aware of the black market for organs, for some reason the idea of organ theft is still regarded as an urban legend. This is partly due to the way it's portrayed in urban legends, which typically include tourists getting drugged and then waking up in a tub of ice with a missing kidney and a hastily sewn side gash.
Authorities maintained for many years that they were only urban legends and that no one had ever awoken in a tub of ice in this state. Nevertheless, officials were ultimately compelled to recognise a worrying trend in China that resulted in a much higher number of organ donors than organ recipients.
A group of specialists concluded in 2019 that it was highly possible that China was killing adherents of the Falun Gong religious movement and other political prisoners before harvesting their organs. Therefore, nobody gets to awaken in an ice bath here. They are being brutally slaughtered and are being stripped of every organ.Around 1999, China began to punish Falun Gong practitioners. This is concurrent with a sharp increase in organ transplant procedures. China carried out 3,596 kidney transplants in 1998. They were above 10,000 a year later, and they appear to have stayed there ever since. However, their own records show they don't execute so many inmates, and even if they did, how would they match so many organs to those in need? China claims to collect organs from officially executed convicts. Everyone seems to agree that they have a second, unofficial source of organs, and that source is almost certainly organ harvesting.
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Few urban legends have horrified the general public as much as the notion of snuff flicks. The concept behind these movies, which purport to depict an actual murder that has been captured on camera, dates back to the 1970s. Over the course of the year, the FBI looked into several real movies that showed deaths in such a realistic manner that viewers believed they had witnessed a real person pass away, but all they found was fiction. Several horrific movies, such Guinea Pig and Cannibal Holocaust, have drawn attention; in fact, in 1991, Charlie Sheen, the actor, informed authorities about the latter. To establish their innocence, the creators had to show how they created the special effects fatalities in the movies.
The majority of websites still assert that snuff films are urban legends and have never been verified to exist. That is untrue. There has been a snuff movie, and it was released not too long ago. Jun Lin was killed by Luka Magnotta in Montreal, Canada, in 2012. This horrifying crime involved cannibalism, necrophilia, and dismemberment. Magnotta captured it all on film. He then uploaded it to the internet.
A gory website posted a roughly 11-minute long video of the murder, captioned "1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick." It displayed the victim being repeatedly stabbed and then dismembered. It had music in it. And several days prior to the murder, he published teasers online. The victims' hands and feet were mailed to primary schools in various parts of Ottawa, Ontario, as well as as far away as the West Coast. Later, the murderer was found guilty of first-degree murder. -
Undoubtedly, one of the scariest urban legends is also one of the most well-known. A group of people—a family, a couple, or even a single person—book a hotel room. They pass out from exhaustion and spend the entire night asleep. The following morning, they begin to notice an odd odor in the hotel room. Until someone has the bright notion to look beneath the bed, they look all about and come up empty-handed. The smell's origin is immediately identified. It's a previous visitor's decaying body.
We've all had unpleasant hotel stays, but finding a body under the bed is the next level. However, how do you miss a whole body? Hotels are notorious for not cleaning as thoroughly as they should. Well, that does occur. as in multiple times. Although it doesn't happen frequently enough to warrant checking under your bed each time you check into a hotel, it wouldn't hurt to start there if you smell something.
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Contrary to popular belief, birth control has a long and fascinating history. To prevent sperm from entering the cervix, the Ancient Egyptians would construct a pessary, which you could compare to a modern diaphragm. Their version, however, was created using materials like crocodile feces.
The history of birth control attempts is one of the most fascinating facets of the history of birth control. Over the years, people have done all kinds of weird and outrageous things, and one of the most notorious of these became an urban legend. Women began using Coca-Cola as a spermicide in the 1950s.
The plot is as straightforward as it is strange. A woman would simply grab a bottle of Coca-Cola and clean herself out since she didn't want to become pregnant after having sex. The theory was that any sperm would be killed by the acid in the Coke. The narrative has been around for a while, and it frequently travels in the well-known "friend of a friend" manner. And without medical knowledge, it would be difficult to demonstrate that it is true.
A Harvard researcher first learned of the purported approach in the 1980s, which is when investigation into the theory originally started. In fact, there is a song from the 1960s about it, according to one of her medical students who claimed that Puerto Rican students at her school had done it.
A series of experiments showed that Diet Coke was a more effective spermicide than New Coke, but that no Coke would probably be a decent spermicide at all given the process of impregnation and the reality that you could never get the beverage deep enough or quickly enough. However, the urban legend only states that people tried it and that much appears to be genuine, not necessarily that it works. -
Not all urban legends involve homicide and mayhem. Some are merely unsettling and somewhat offensive. like the infamous tale of the man in the pool, of which everyone has undoubtedly heard some variation.
This story, the specifics of which are easily adaptable to any public pool in any city worldwide, goes as follows. Rescue personnel were required to reach a man who had been stranded. How did a man get up trapped in a swimming pool? It wasn't the entire man, just a delicate area of his anatomy that was caught in a suction filter, so to speak.
As ridiculous as it may sound, a man actually experienced it in 1994. Police in Scotland discovered him with his pants down and his business firmly in place. He was rushed to the hospital to treat his wounds, and he will always have to deal with the fact that he is the man in the famous and humorous story.
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If you reside in or near Fairfax, Virginia, you are likely familiar with the Bunny Man's legend. He's the neighborhood bad guy who folks need to watch out for, particularly close to a bridge on Colchester Road.
Legend has it that the region previously housed a secluded asylum for the insane. Despite being transferred, one busload of patients crashed. The most of the patients were once more rounded up, but one escaped. One group of gutted and partially consumed rabbits hanging from a bridge was the sole trace of him that was discovered. Never was the patient located.
A few months later, some neighborhood teenagers go to the bridge to hang out on Halloween. The Bunny Man's reign of terror starts when they are discovered gutted and hanging from the bridge the following day. You face the danger of meeting him if you go to the bridge on Halloween.
There are several gaps in this narrative, not the least of which is the absence of an asylum in the vicinity. However, there is a tale of a man with something on his head attacking a couple in a car and hurling a hatchet at them.
The "something" on his head was transformed into bunny ears by the press, and the narrative developed from there. It didn't take long for the initial story to evolve into a mad man disguised as a rabbit who had escaped from an asylum and was stringing people up, and the rest is history. -
One of the greatest and most infamous tech urban legends of all time concerned ET, for the Atari 2600, probably the worst video game ever produced. It's difficult to understand just how horrible the game was if you've never played it. The game was complete rubbish even with the extremely basic gameplay and graphics that Atari was providing. Pixelated ET was attempting to put together a phone and get away from the FBI. You would enter one screen, then another that was nearly identical, and possibly fall through a hole to another screen that was nearly identical. Time and time again.
Both critically and financially, the game failed. After an initial sales surge from delighted fans, it took just six weeks to build, and when everyone discovered the game was terrible, sales crashed. What about trash, by the way? It is dumped. At least, that was the legend. Millions, if not thousands of copies, of unsold books were allegedly discreetly transported to the desert and dumped there to be forgotten. There was no possibility that something so obviously absurd could be real.
After years of rumors, authorization was eventually granted in 2014 for a crew to explore the purported dump site. It turned out that the reports were genuine, and there was a windfall of ancient Atari consoles and games that had been crushed, foremost among them the unsold ET copies that the public had so bitterly despised thirty years previously. -
Puebla, a city in Mexico, has a long history dating back to 1531. A popular urban legend from the present described Puebla's underground realm. A system of tunnels was allegedly dug out in the centuries before the city's founding and almost as far back. That was the plot, at least. But no one had ever discovered concrete evidence of them, and they were not depicted on any maps. Just one of those tales that everybody seemed to be familiar with.
The plot abruptly turned around in 2014 when construction workers actually found one of the tunnels. Then, after more investigation, many more were discovered. They were able to identify a vast network that was probably intended to link important buildings from the city's founding.
Puebla, one of the first towns to be founded during the Spanish colonial period, was crucial to the Catholic Church. It is thought that the tunnels connected buildings owned by the church and allowed for the covert movement of persons or treasure. They were also utilized to stage attacks and convey troops and ammunition during the war.
There are well-built tunnels that span more than 10 kilometres in length. They are big enough for a man to travel through on horseback and have withstood earthquakes and roughly 500 years of building. -
Along with the Jersey Devil and Slenderman, Charlie No Face undoubtedly conjures up the ideal images for an urban legend. Charlie No Face, also known as the Green Man, was not a tale made up to frighten people, unlike the previous two. His name was Ray Robinson, and he was a genuine person. However, it was accurate to say that he lacked a face.
Charlie No Face was a terrible character who supposedly stalked the streets in the late hours near Pittsburgh. His skin gleamed an unsettling green, and he was without eyes, a nose, or lips.
When Ray Robinson made the unfortunate error of climbing a tree and touching an active electricity line, he was actually 8 years old. He was electrocuted as a result, and the burns were so severe that he lost the majority of his face, yet he lived.
Although Ray was born blind, he was fully aware that many people would find his appearance to be horrific. As a result, he decided to only leave the house at night. Perhaps not so much to protect others as to protect himself from having to deal with people asking him questions. However, it ultimately gave rise to the legend of Charlie No Face, which was the result of people's wild speculations in response to seeing someone who didn't conform to the stereotypes we have of other people.
As word of the incident grew, many individuals would travel at night on the highways in search of Ray. Some people did it out of kindness and shared a drink or took a picture. However, some mistreated him by assaulting or degrading him. Ray was always friendly and happy to talk to anyone and spend time with them, even though most people first sought him out as a joke or a dare. As a result, many individuals came to truly like and respect their interactions with him. -
Choosing what to do with someone's cremated remains is frequently a significant decision for many individuals. This is the final resting place of someone you loved. How do you behave? Sometimes the departed will have expressed their wishes, and other times the grieving must use their best judgment. The last hurrah of many of the dearly departed is said to be at Disneyland, according to urban mythology.
The rumor that people frequently disperse ashes at Disneyland and Disney World has circulated since before 2010. Additionally, Disney is a theme park, whereas this might not be a big deal at many popular tourist destinations like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. There are many families there in an enclosed space that probably don't want to breathe in your granddad. So this must be just a myth, right? Just a terrible story of misguided folks saying goodbye to a loved one in a somewhat careless way? Not really.
It turns out that a startling amount of people really scatter ashes at the Magic Kingdom. Prior to the epidemic, it was happening around once per month. Disney's personnel have a code they use to notify others of the issue because it occurs so frequently. So, be aware of dust clouds if you ever hear someone at Disneyland mention a HEPA cleansing. Oddly enough, despite the fact that ashes are scattered everywhere, the Haunted Mansion receives the most of them.