You've probably heard that all urban legends are actually based on real events… That may not be true, but these weird urban legends are (or at least were) inspired by the truth.
The tunnels of Puebla
Residents of the city of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City, had a legend that a mysterious network of tunnels lay beneath their feet. Never discovered over the centuries, these tunnels are part of local folklore.
But in 2015, construction workers stumbled upon one of them by chance. Drilling teams then dug and revealed nearly ten kilometers of tunnels under the streets of Puebla. They would have been dug from the 16th to the 19th century, and are now part of tourist attractions.
Alice's murders
The story of the Alice murders is a famous and recent urban legend of Japan. This is a series of homicides believed to have taken place between 1999 and 2005. While there is no known connection between the victims, and the murders appear to be entirely separate, a sordid resemblance connects them. A playing card was with each victim, signed with Alice's name, written in the victim's blood.
The specifics of these killings seem surprisingly similar, right down to the names of the prey and some gruesome details about them. The steadfastness and popularity of this legend is probably based on the popularity of the Internet. No evidence confirms them, and their existence is at the heart of a hot controversy. There was, however, one serial killer who left a playing card with his victims, but in Spain rather than Japan. Fortunately, this card game killer was apprehended in 2003 , and sentenced to 142 years in prison.
Staten Island Cropsey
According to this macabre legend, a man named Cropsey haunted the abandoned Willowbrook State School. In some variations, he is presented as either the ax killer or a hideous bogeyman. In both cases, we are talking about a murderous predator looking for lost children.
These stories are unfortunately based on real facts. The killer's name was Andre Rand, the school janitor until it closed in 1987. He then lived in the school's basements for several years and was suspected of missing many children. Despite the lack of compelling evidence, he was convicted of kidnapping children in 1988, and again in 2004.
We even made a documentary called Cropsey, which takes stock of the myth and the reality around this murderer.
Dog man
This Arkansas legend of a werewolf-like man wandering around the town of Quitman is hardly less gruesome than the reality. Gerald Bettis was born in 1954. He was said to be cruel and sadistic, capturing wild animals to practice his twisted experiments. His cruelty would only increase, and he would have persecuted his elderly parents.
In 1981, her father's corpse was discovered in the family home, in a death that has remained suspicious. Local newspapers reported on the disease, but many citizens reported on murder instead. Gerald Bettis then virtually jailed his mother, until Elder Protection Services took her to safety. She then turned to justice and sent him to prison, where he died in the 1980s.
It is said that his spirit still haunts the house where his father died. In several versions of this legend, her ghost would always haunt her: appearing hairy like a dog or, according to others, an imposing man wearing a brown jacket and a bow tie. You will be reassured (or not!) To learn that these famous ghost stories can be explained.
Rabbit man
Let's start with the legend surrounding this story. A bus transporting patients from a lunatic asylum is said to have crashed in 1904 in Fairfax County, Virginia. The patients on the run would have all been caught, except one. And shortly after the accident, dead rabbits were reportedly seen nearby, several of them hanged from the Fairfax station bridge. Hiiii!
But this story was never recognized, and historians claim that no lunatic asylum existed in Fairfax County in 1904. What is true, however, is that two mysterious and frightening incidents occurred in this area in 1970, involving a man disguised as a rabbit. A young couple in a car reportedly passed a man disguised as a white rabbit during the night, who allegedly hit their vehicle with an ax (the windows smashed, but there were no injuries). Two weeks later, another man from Fairfax County spotted someone dressed as a rabbit slaughtering the porch of a new, unoccupied house with an ax. He had disappeared when the police arrived. The Rabbit Man was never apprehended, and the Fairfax Bridge was never renamed the Rabbit Man Bridge.
Charlie without a face
This 20th century urban legend comes from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Legend has it that a character with a severely burned face was prowling through an abandoned railway tunnel overnight, disrupting the electricity with just his presence. Curious teenagers are said to have crept into the tunnel to try and catch a glimpse of him.
As it turned out, the Faceless Charlie was a plump person, and his name was not Charlie. It was Raymond Robinson , victim of a serious accident involving a power line which had disfigured him, resulting in his imprisonment during the day, and his nocturnal outings. But he haunted nothing. He was actually quite nice, and let curious kids take pictures of him in exchange for cigarettes.
The Polybius arcade game
According to this legend, an arcade game named Polybius had just appeared a month ago in Portland (Oregon), in 1981. The government would have presented it as a psychological experiment. It acted like a drug, causing seizures and nightmares in players. Government agents collected player information from the device they played on.
Although this device probably never existed, certain events related to this type of games would have fueled this legend. One of them, the game Tempest , would have caused epileptic reactions and nausea in some players when it was released in 1981. Another said FBI agents were monitoring an arcade during the same period. to investigate illegal betting.
Alligators in the sewers
This is not a legend like any other, because we've all more or less heard of giant alligators hidden in the city's sewers. In one of the bizarre stories, a whole colony of these saurians would be found in the sewers of New York City! Although unlikely, there have been several reports of alligators in sewers, particularly in the southern United States.
In states like Florida, where alligators are a part of the wildlife, storms and flooding can drag these animals into the sewer system. Police actually pulled a 2-foot baby alligator out of the New York sewers in 2010 . But their colony is a myth, because an adult alligator could not survive the winter in this city.
The Loyon
The Swiss have started to tell the story of a mysterious figure who walks through the Maules Forest, dressed in camouflage clothing and a gas mask. For ten years, we barely hear about its existence, through a few visual testimonies in the newspapers . None of these testimonies reported threatening or aggressive behavior, despite their sinister demeanor.
In the absence of proof, this character has become a folk figure. It has been called the "ghost of Maules" or "the Loyon". But in 2013, a photo of the Loyon by a pedestrian restarted the story.
A few months later, his gas mask and clothing were found in the woods, along with a mysterious note pleading his harmlessness and inability to endure the perception of being a monster any longer. Suicide or simple abandonment of the character, his disappearance still remains a mystery.
Murderous medicine cabinets
In 1992, the film Candyman stood out as one of the scariest horror films ever produced. In one of the most famous scenes, an evil spirit with one of its hands fitted with a hook appears through the main character's medicine cabinet.
And to add some layers to the horror, it was recognized that this access by the medicine cabinet was not only fictitious. This would have happened in Chicago, in 1987, when Ruthie McCoy was murdered by a group of intruders who entered her home through the hole intended for this medicine cabinet. The seedy Grace Abbott real estate project, in which Ruthie McCoy lived, was built with holes in the walls to place these medicine cabinets, the only thin barriers between adjacent apartments. Candyman's story is mostly inspired by the short story The Forbidden. The director also drew on “ They Came in Through the Bathroom Mirror ,” a detailed journalistic report of the gruesome murder in this real estate project.
