Urban Legends

Imagine this: it's the witching hour, moonless and chilly, and you and your friends are huddled close to the fire in some rubber estate, taking turns to tell horror stories. Someone has just recounted a horror story, insisting that it's really true, that it really happened to a friend's friend's grandmother or something. You sit there silently and try not to let the story spook you into paranoia. And then, someone in the shadows clear his throat and says, "Have you heard the one about..."

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#1. Bloody Mary - This has to be one of the most famous urban legends around. There are many variations of the tale, but basically, it tells of a group of girls (all the stories I've read tell of girls, i wonder why) who stood in the bathroom in the dim candlelight chanting "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary" and on the thirteenth (some say seventh) time, something came out of the mirror and none of the girls survived to tell the tale. Like many horror stories, this particular one has been adapted into various novels and movies, the most popular incarnation being the 1992 movie Candyman. Check out also the episode of Supernatural featuring Bloody Mary.

#2. Satan's Face in the Smoke on 9/11 - Now this is a funny one, but many television viewers were actually convinced that they saw the face of Satan in the cloud of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center after it was struck by a jetliner on September 11th, 2001. Seriously. With horns and all (the video can be found here). However, Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon (apart from 'stark raving mad', I believe) - "pareidolia" (the tendency to perceive human-like faces and other familiar visual images/patterns in places that they don't belong). Hey, children see shapes of animals in the clouds all the time, right?

#3. Numbers station - OK, this is more conspiracy theory than urban legend, but hey, this is kinda cool. Anyway, numbers stations basically broadcast artificially-generated voices readings streams of numbers, words, spelling alphabets or Morse code in a variety of languages, usually in a female or a child's voice. Who's behind those transmissions, what's the purpose of the transmissions or where the stations are broadcasting from, nobody really knows. Over the years, there are quite a number of theories circulating around, the essential one being that number stations are secret mode of communication for (a) spies and black ops teams; (b) drug dealers; (c) aliens *snickers*

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#4. The Mysterious Hitchhiker - This is, again, one of the oldest and the most often repeated urban legends around the world. It tells of a man picking up a hitchhiker (often a woman) on the side of a deserted road. He drives her to her address, and when he turns around to say goodbye, he finds that she has vanished from the backseat of the car. Confused, he rings the bell of the house, whereupon he learns that the woman has been dead for years, killed in a car accident on the spot where he had picked her up. In the Malaysian version, however, the ending is slightly different - the young woman pays the taxi driver, but upon reaching home he discovers that the notes are paper monies for the dead.

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#5. Kuchisake-onna - translated to the Slit-mouth Woman, the Kuchisake-onna is a well-known Japanese urban legend that sparked some unnecessary furor in Japan in the summer of 1979. Anyway, children walking home alone, especially at night may encounter a woman wearing a surgical mask (this is not at all odd in Japan as people wear them to protect others from their coughs or flu). The woman will stop the child and ask, "am i beautiful?" and if the child says no, they will be killed with a pair of scissors which the woman carries. If the child says yes, the woman pulls away the mask, revealing that her mouth is slit from ear to ear (something akin to the Joker in The Dark Knight) and asks, "what about now?". At this point, regardless if the child's answer is yes or no, the woman will kill the child either by decapitation or by slicing the child in two.

So there you go, urban legends. Feel free to share, if you have any  :)
Til the next time, folks!