Today I was reading about Polybius, the most sinister video game ever created. Built to warp the minds of all who played it, and possibly to recruit young gamers in 1981 to organizations with nefarious goals. FOCUS: What's your favorite urban legend, and why? Have you ever experienced an urban legend in real life? Have you ever believed one, only to find out later that it was just a legend? Do you have a family member that insists that the hook hanging on the car door story is true and it happened to a cousin of her best childhood friend?
That all Australians are tall, broad shouldered, tanned, blonde beach gods. It's simply not true. Some of us have dark hair....
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/fredrogers/a/mr_rogers.htm Mr. Rogers was a sniper during Vietnam and had: I love it because it's so ridiculous. Here's this sweet old man who apparently killed 150 people?
My personal favorite is how you aren't supposed to swallow gum because it'll take years to digest. I mean who in the their right mind would come up with something so absurd, much less get untold numbers of people to believe it? But then again Jersey Shore is on it's third season, so it doesn't seem as far fetched as it once did.
We live in a nice suburb with nice houses and lots of kids running around when it's nice out. Therefore, the ice cream truck loves to come down our street. We have started telling our four year old that if the ice cream truck rings his bell that means that he is out of ice cream. So when the truck drives down ringing his bell, she tells the other kids that there is no ice cream because the bell is ringing. Yes, I realize that I am an asshole for this.
I don't know if this qualifies as an urban legend or folk treatment, but when my son was gestating, my ex-wife's mother/grandmother/aunts all insisted that she wear a safety pin or a key tied around her pregnant belly duing a lunar eclipse in 2000, or else our son would be born with unspecified birth defects. My ex and I both secretly agreed that it was total bullshit, and she lied to her family about wearing a safety pin around her belly. Our son was born exceptionally healthy and without complications. He is a super kid all around, and I will tell anyone who tries to give me that same line of advice that they are full of shit unless they can come up with scientific evidence proving me wrong. The worst part: At the rehab facility I was forced to attend for the last six months, there was a sex education class, and one of teachers was a total idiot. Seriously, this woman was dumb. I really don't know how she got through college, but she had a degree. She ended up getting fired. But anyway, she brought this treatment/preventative up as a valid course of action if you or your significant other happens to be pregnant when there is any sort of eclipse coming. I told her how full of shit she was in the kindest words possible, otherwise I would be sent to prison if I offended her. She refused to shake her beliefs, even when I asked for explanation. Not all of the counselors there were that stupid. Some were actually pretty good. But she wasn't.
The most common myths I hear are about 420. Ranging from reasonable, that 420 is the number of chemicals in THC, to the absurd, that the first harvest of marijuana in America was exactly 420 plants, I hear this shit far too often. Just smoke, for fuck sakes. I mean, once in awhile it's fun to speculate and discuss, but I'm hearing these theories almost every day. It's bloody irritating. Also, this one is amusing: http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/horrors/a/clown_statue.htm
This was the one I was just about to post. My third day of high school, one of the older kids in my math class told this story as having happened in one of the towns near ours. The story spread around school and I spent the better part of a year believing it. Eventually I stumbled over it on some website about urban legends, but by then I'd retold it to a ton of other people. Oh well. Apparently I used to be gullible as shit.
Most people are when they're young. I used to believe that babies were delivered by the stork. This one persisted until age 13. I was also told by some kid in school that men's nipples could produce milk as well. And yeah, I squeezed them quite a bit trying to get it to work.
Strangely enough this one is true http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-males-can-lactate
When I was in jr. high (7th-9th grade), all of the 7th graders were told that there was a swimming pool on the roof of our school. We were also told that once we got to 9th grade we would get to swim in it. Not only did the older kids tell us these lies but the teachers also participated. When we would ask them, they would never deny that there was a pool but would only say they hadn't been in it. By the end of 7th grade someone had found out and stopped the rumors. The next year, we were more than happy to tell the younger kids that there was a pool on the roof and kept the legend going. Shit, we were dumb. We had an ice cream truck in town that was driven by a creepy man and his wife. The older kids in my neighborhood told my friends and I that the man had gone to jail for molesting a child in the back of the ice cream truck in the mid 1980's. While the story didn't stop us from buying ice cream, I never went up to the truck and bought ice cream alone.
When I was in High School in the 80's we believed that Spanish Fly's existed and if you slipped one into a girls drink she would want to fuck your brains out.