3 Well-known Urban Legends of the United States
These American urban legends are well known in all their various variants, but as we believe that you may have heard them incompletely or untidy, we propose here a quick review so that you can tell them to your friends with the formality that the case requires. Here, then, are three urban legends originating in the United States that have spread throughout the American continent and even throughout the world.
The ghost hitchhiker
Perhaps the most widespread urban legend of all those that circulate by word of mouth, it is about an attractive young woman who begs on the side of the road for a car to stop so that she can reach her destination on time. The friendly driver, who is always a male, is happy to share the journey with such a beautiful young lady, and there are times when he is tempted to strike up a conversation. The young woman is shy and only responds with evasions or monosyllables. Finally, it tells you that you want to get off (in some versions it just disappears). But he leaves forgotten in the car, as a result of a hasty departure, some object, which can be a garment, a bouquet of flowers, anything that the driver later feels the need to return by going to thehouse where he has observed that the young woman has entered after getting off. Great is his surprise when in that place they inform him that the young woman has died several years ago, generally in a bloody way. This legend resembles in many details that of the penitent of Mexico City and that of the ghost nun of Bogotá.
Crocodiles in the sewers
This legend probably originated with the discovery of a small group of alligators that, after escaping from a hatchery near New York City, where they had been brought to be incorporated into a zoo, took refuge in the sewers of the city. Since then countless reports have been heard of large sewer-dwelling reptiles surviving by feeding on humans. The crocodiles reach a gigantic size and are extraordinarily aggressive according to the supposed witnesses, but no routine search carried out in the sewers has been able to find them. The legend reached its peak of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to one of the most famous fictional characters in the Batman saga, the monstrous Killer Croc.
Walt Disney's dead body freeze
This urban legend is quite tricky, since it enjoys a denial, and in turn, the denial of denial, if we are allowed to play extreme with words. It has been repeated ad nauseam that Walt Disney, who died on December 15, 1966, was subjected, once dead, to a cryogenic treatment, that is, scientifically induced freezing in order to preserve the body intact in case one day the science finds a way to bring the dead back to life, without resorting to zombie methodology. Well, indeed, Walt Disney's body was cremated on December 17, 1966, two days after his death, and his ashes buried in Forest Lane Memorial Park in Glendale, California. And yet a persistent rumor claims that it was not Disney's body that was cremated, and that his body is under cryogenic treatment in a secret place. Impossible to check, for now.
