Razor blades hidden in Halloween candy; pet alligators flushed down toilets as babies, all grown up and terrorizing the sewers; spring breakers blacking out then waking up in ice baths with their kidneys missing… Urban legends like these and countless others tell dark stories in the most mundane of settings. An evolutionary link to folk tales, migratory legends, and memorates, they use the strange and supernatural to comment on modern life.
While largely agreed to be a hoax, the urban legend at the center of my book Polybius—an arcade game that literally drives its player insane—fits that definition to a tee. In the 1980s, when the legend would’ve originated, kids were flocking to arcades and spending billions; in the late ‘90s, when the legend started to spread, games were growing more sophisticated and online play was taking off. In both eras, gatekeepers in politics and the media as well as some parents and partners labeled games as a pathway to violent societal decay.
Dramatic changes in how people interfaced with new technology were underway. Whether the legend of Polybius was meant to be taken as a serious cautionary tale, or jab at those advising caution, it resonated, spread, and gradually became part of the unofficial urban legend canon.
It’s also far from the only legend to be featured in other media. Here are a few of my favorite short stories, books, films, and games inspired by—and in one case, actually inspiring—urban legends.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
For readers of a certain age, this is a book series you’d know on sight thanks to Stephen Gammell’s nightmarishly evocative illustrations. They were so disturbing, they turned into urban legends themselves after they were pulled by the publisher and replaced with different art in 2011, before finally returning to new editions of the books in 2017.
But it’s Alvin Schwartz’s wit and keen eye for morbid detail that sets Scary Stories apart from other horror anthologies aimed at younger readers. A journalist before becoming an author, Schwartz had an instinct for research that served him well. Between three volumes, he spent years talking to experts in urban legends and folk lore, stocking his collections with classics like Sounds, High Beams, and The Hook alongside stranger, surreal regional entries like Me Tie Dough-ty Walker.
Together with Jan Harold Brunvand’s The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Schwartz’s three Scary Stories collections—and his early reader, In a Dark, Dark Room—make a great historical compendium for urban legend aficionados. The stories are just plain creepy, too.
The Rule of Three by Sam Ripley
The notion that bad things come in threes has been around so long, it was given a pop-cultural reboot as “the rule of threes.” And it sits at the center of Sam Ripley’s complex, pitch black thriller that explores what happens when a trio of young women—each afraid they’re going to fall victim to the rule—desperately search for order in their increasingly disordered worlds.
Amy, Ila, and Eve have all lost people close to them—twice, each—leaving them at the business end of the rule of threes, if you believe that sort of thing. And this is sort of what the story’s about, characters coming to terms with the chaos that’s engulfing their lives. Are they being paranoid and pushing themselves to the brink for no reason, or is there something stranger going on?
Why do I keep losing the people I love? Why do I keep screwing up my life? What if there was a pattern, and can I disrupt it? The desire to find order in a world constantly shifting in random, sometimes catastrophic directions is real, and urban legends like the rule of threes deceptively offer explanations for the seemingly inexplicable. Ripley’s book dives deep on the meaning of a classic legend through three challenging points of view.
When a Stranger Calls dir. Fred Walton (1979)
The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs—think, “the calls are coming from inside the house!”—is an urban legend staple. It was featured in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as The Babysitter, and has been employed as a plot device in multiple films including the classic Black Christmas and Fred Walton’s less heralded but no less enjoyable slice of late ‘70s stalker pulp, When a Stranger Calls.
Anchored by a terrifically vulnerable performance from the great Carol Kane, Stranger starts off with Kane’s babysitter losing the children she was charged with watching to a homicidal maniac, and barrels forward to even darker territory from there.
Walton treats the first act almost like a stand-alone film (it’s worth noting he’d dramatized the legend before in a short entitled The Sitter), and it’s a top-notch exercise in sustained visual tension. He even returned to Kane’s Jill Johnson and Charles Durning’s sympathetic detective John Clifford in a made-for-cable sequel 12 years later that matches the original’s impossibly tense opening and follows the exploits of—get ready for it—a killer ventriloquist; it’s delightful.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
While it predates the term “urban legend” by over a century, Washington Irving’s short story shares (or perhaps helped create) urban legend DNA.
Irving wrote the story while touring Europe, where “the headless horseman” was already well-known in folk tales told across Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. The choice to make his story’s ghost a Hessian trooper, decapitated by a cannonball during the Revolutionary War, ties to a battlefield legend told in the real town of Sleepy Hollow. And in Ichabod Crane, disruptive change arrives in Sleepy Hollow in the form of a gangly, affable school master, unfit for life in a place where education isn’t prized and Brom Bones likes monopolizing the spotlight.
Ichabod’s ironclad belief in the supernatural drives him to the brink of madness, while Sleepy Hollow’s rejection of the outside world keeps it trapped in time. Swirling myth, folk lore, and real-life anecdotes, Irving suggests that unchecked fear—of ghosts, of change—can lead to trouble. In the same way modern urban legends explore fear arising from new, strange ideas and behaviors, Irving fuses pieces of outlandish, speculative history together to comment on a world at odds with its changing self.
Fatal Frame, created by Makoto Shibata & Keisuke Kikuchi
Beginning life as a Japanese-language game called Project Zero, Fatal Frame (as it was retitled for North America and Europe) draws inspiration from legend of the Himuro Mansion. The site of an occult ritual that led to the gruesome deaths of seven people, it became a hotbed for paranormal activity. There are pictorials of the mansion and articles referencing it as one of Japan’s most haunted spots online, and a lengthy quote from the game’s creator detailing a handful of specific instances that inspired him.
It’s also seemingly all made up.
While Fatal Frame purported to be based on true events on its box and via a pre-game title card, Project Zero did not. There’s never been any corroboration or first-hand accounts of people visiting the mansion. And that quote laying out all the spooky goings-on that inspired the game turned out to be from a press release that was apparently only issued in North America.
So, and interestingly, what was very likely a simple, savvy marketing ploy seems to have taken on a life of its own—Fatal Frame is the rare example of media that, in claiming a connection to tragic events that likely never happened in the first place, appears to have created its own urban legend.
Buy the Book
Polybius
The premise of Seanan McGuire’s Incryptid series is basically that all urban legends are true, or at least based on truth, and tbe protagonists try to protect them from humans and vice versa
That thought makes me consider that Stross’s The Laundry Files is at least adjacent to this
“Croatoan” by Harlan Ellison. Heard it read out loud by Mr. Ellison in 1974, and it still creeps me out.