What's an urban legend from YOUR hometown? Create your own urban legends and myths using Campfire! They're literally built for this sort of thing :D www.campfirewriting.com/write/for-novelists?TH-cam&HFM_Q4_23
In my town, there is a myth about a group of ghosts who would, all naked and covered in oil so the police couldn't catch them, rob vehicles that would stop at the local pub. It's my favourite local myth because of how silly it is; it sounds like a modern internet meme
Man i'm from bolivia and I can say that elephant graveyards are real, they are not an urban legends, it cost like 10 us dollars and after the first bucket they give you the choice to back down and if you choose not to they locked the door and live you there to die
I like the way _Gravity Falls_ deals with urban legends, where sometimes they're true, sometimes they're not, and sometimes there are *things* out there that aren't written down.
There is _so much_ any writer can learn from Gravity Falls, and especially when it comes to the urban legends. We see them through the eyes of two outsiders, through the townspeople (and especially through the ones who aren't taken too seriously, like McGucket), through the people who profit off them, and the people who fall victim to them. Sometimes even through the eyes of the legends themselves. I adore the different perspectives we get on them, whether they're true or not. Absolutely brilliant series.
The best part is Gravity Falls also has a bunch of urban legends that are in some capacity true, but very different from how everyone expects them to be. Like the unicorns, where there's the one pretentious unicorn that turns out to just be straight out lying to them when the rest are mostly pretty chill and kinda mean. Or when in episode 1 there's all this build up to Mabel's new boyfriend being a zombie or a vampire or something and then it's a bunch of kidnapping gnomes. Equally a threat but never quite what you expect
A lot of monster myths are boogeyman myths meant to scare kids into behaving. I can see a fantasy novel still incorporating one as part of their story’s culture.
@@SEAZNDragonIt isn't actually that simple though. Pretty much all such mythologies come from essentially distortions of tales of some real life event that then gets synchronized to explain it and reinforce some set of behaviors. If you had an actual fantasy world you frankly would probably have even more tales based on actual things rather than stuff like a inundated section of forest that becomes a deadly bog sucking people down to caverns eroded beneath.
When monsters really exist, I think the myths and local legends would just be inverted. People would have tales of a forest, a mountain, a cabin somewhere, that is completely safe and that the monsters never approach. Either way, it's escapism; they would just be trying to escape from a different reality. And this type of myth could still be used on children, just in the opposite direction: instead of "if you're bad, those monsters will come and get you," it would be "if you're good, you'll be safe from these monsters."
On the other hand a lot of myths are meant to warn people away from abandoned buildings (dangerous for lots of reasons, especially medical facilities that could still have dangerous chemicals or radioactive materials), or to advise against specific behaviors like chasing strange noises in the Appalachians is a great way to get lost and die of exposure or predation. The other half of "campfire ghost stories" is that people enjoy spooking and scaring people. So making up a ghost story is considered fun to do. People also have evolutionary "caution/paranoia" that makes them prone to being freaked out buy creepy stuff, and to try and explain it. Because of this even if everyone knows about monsters in your world the way we know about animals, that doesn't mean their can't be ghost stories.
I actually created an "urban legend" in my childhood. Our old house was quite loud - floors creaking even when no one is walking, wind slamming doors shut, a cat that sometimes walked as loudly as an adult human (especially on the stairs), etc. So, when my two friends were staying over and got spooked by the noises, I just casually said "oh, that's my dead aunt". I never had any aunts - dead or alive - so it wasn't a specific person, just an unidentified aunt slamming the doors shut and making the calling boards creak. Somehow it stuck and now we say "oh, that's just the aunt" to calm ourselves when we hear an unidentified noise in the house.
Never once had I considered to separate my fantasy monsters into existing and legend. The idea between “Be careful, there is a hideous monster dragon that lives in that lake. “ to instead “Legend of so an so serpent has made our people wary of those waters for centuries” leaves for sure a bigger impact to the character and the reader. The worldbuilding being important for sure, but the tension from the “unsure” is fantastic! Thanks Tim!!
Pokemon almost does that with its legendary and mythical monsters. They're 100% actually real, but it comes close, the narrative treats them like there's doubt, up until the plot has you interacting with them.
I actually wrote one of those recently for my book. A story about a tribesman who lured his wife into a forest protected by wood elves, killing her and blaming the elves for his crime. He ends up getting punished twice, first by the elves and later by his tribe-in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Its main purpose was to explain why the tribes treat the local forest the way they do, but there's also a lot of covert world building sprinkled in, like the fundemental differences between how humans and elves think and what they value as well as local customs. Its a secondary avenue of world building I love to include here and there
not sure this counts as an urban legend: but my family is from East Germany and my mother always told me, that you cannot do any laundry (especially big sheets or table cloth) between christmas and epiphany (january 6th). She never told me why, because this was just, what her grandmother had told her. years later i found out that this myth is acutally connected to the wild hunt, that chases through the sky in the time between the years (Rauhnächte in German). and when you hang out the laundry to dry, these spirits might get caught in the sheets, get upset and curse you for the next year. When I told my mother about it, she had no idea, that this was the origin of the laundy-ban - this part of the story had just been lost in time
The urban legends can vary through geography too. In my country (Belgium), we have tales of werewolves, ghosts and witches. But they're mostly pretty innocent, playful even. Werewolves jump on your back and make you carry them until you're tired. Ghosts are just sinners who need to do a task (and the living can help them). Witches are mostly talking cats, or flying women. There are two creatures that kill you, especially children. The necker (waterdemon with a LOT of variations), drags you down under water till you drown. And the Hopdevils (demons of the crops, with a some of variations as well), kidnaps or eat children. Why are these so malicious? First of all, they're ment to scare children. But, even as the country is full of towns and cities now, it used to be a place with a lot of rivers and swamps where most inhabitants were farmers. Water and crops were part of their daily life. And drowning and afternoon heat killed people. It makes sense their legends reflect that.
I'm from Costa Rica. My favorite legends are about the duendes, little people who look like very small children and live in coffee plantations or woodland close to human dwellings. They can be helpful, like household spirits, or mischievous. They are said to lure children to play with them and get them lost. There is also El Cadejos (Kahdeyhos), a huge phantom black dog with goat hooves, that haunts men who walk at night in lonely roads. He was once a man, cursed due to his wild ways, and he must make sure other men keep to the good path by scaring them out of their socks. He never appears to women.
Thank you for sharing!! I love hearing these kinds of stories, especially getting to hear them from people who actually are from the area of the urban legend
The Philippines also has a version of Duwendes, where they are mostly there as like Karmic Entities of the woods or generally natural settings, where they curse humans who intrude on their lands or annoy them. Some homes host duwendes too, and can still curse them right in their own home.
If you think about it, innaccurate myths and legends in a world with magic would be much like science misinformation in our world Edit: one variation of this I haven't seen as often is when the accepted idea about the magic system, which are in-universe functional and useful in the same way newtonian physics is useful on earth, but actually an incomplete picture of what is going on, the way newtonion physics breaks down if you go too big and relativity breaks down if you go too small. But that's something I'm trying to do in my fantasy, where the magic system's official explanation proves to be flawed and limited, and discovering more about it expands the power sets of the characters in a way that is believable. They even discover a subset of magic that is entirely focused on helping the user understand magic, but which was too meta to be easily discovered on its own
Something as simple as a person that hates magic telling lies about it, "You know the shield spell is dangerous to the caster, right? Last time someone casted it suffocated in their own bubble. Nothing can penetrate the shield's walls, not even air."
There is two lines from Gargoyles about this sort of thing. In the Mid series, one of the characters state "All things are true" about something they run across. Later, in the comic series, King Arthur comments "All things are true. Few things are accurate".
In my hometown, there's an old legend about a lizard that became so so large that it started to devour the sheep and other animals, the town's people were scared and couldn't find any solution, except a famous thief, who forged a plan to create false sheep filled with dynamite inside of them (in some retellings he fed real sheep dynamite), he then waited for the lizard to eat the sheep and the thief beats the beast by making it explode. The legend is called 'El lagarto de la magdalena'.
Sounds like the legend of Wawel dragon from Krakow, Poland, much like in your legend the dragon was eating livestock so a shoemaker took a sheep, put sulfur inside and when the dragon ate it, it became so thirsty it drank and drank until it burst. So similar!
@@Vexy7 exactly, they even drink "La sangre del lagarto" - "blood of the lizard" which is basically polish "grzaniec", this story sounds the same as the one about "smok wawelski", probably because of jewish community who moved between Krakow and Jaen
My hometown doesn’t have many stories attached to it anymore (it’s mostly become a suburb of a much larger city in more recent years), but the town is cut in two by a valley called the Hungry Hollow. It’s very marshy and forested with a creek and some trails going through it. That’s about all the legends we still have talk about. Anyways, the Hollow is generally treated as if it were an entity itself. During the day it’s perfectly content and even welcoming to people. However, come night if you live on one of the streets near the Hungry Hollow you lock your doors. If you cross the bridge, either do so with someone else around or in a car, and do not stop. Bring any and all pets inside. Even ignoring the folklore, pets do go missing around it. Do not walk it’s trails. The Hollow is much less friendly to the town at night. (Probably stems from the shenanigans of the local coyote population that lives in the Hollow and can’t be dislodged)
That feels like a great one to do a short horror film about. Big city couple move next to the Hollow and get warned about how to treat it but they laugh it off thinking it's just superstition. But as the new folks keep breaking the rules, everything becomes more unsettling each night until the climax where the lady is walking her dog on the trails as darkness falls and something starts following her. She end up running for her life until she gets onto the road and a car almost runs her over. Its the local sheriff and he finally explains that the Hollow is full of coyotes, that the stories are to scare the kids into being safe, and offers her and the dog a lift back home. And in the last shot, as the car pulls away, the camera focuses into the darkness of the Hollow to reveal - just for a second - something that is *not* a coyote, lurking. And cut to black.
My grandmother told me that when she was little girl in her home she was tortured by a monster called "Dydko Straw Legs". This monster looked like a hybrid of a human and a spider. He had a large head and moved on many legs made of straw. Dydko kidnapped children who were walking alone in suburban forests. My grandmother lived on the outskirts of Warsaw throughout WW II. My great-grandparents told her these stories so that she wouldn't go into the forest to look for food. Meeting soldiers or stepping on a mine meant death.
The black ambulance kinda unlocked a childhood memory for me. I'm from Poland, so central/eastern Europe, depends who's asking. In my childhood town, there were tales of a black car, but it wasn't an ambulance, it was a black Volga. Details vary depending on who's telling the story. The version I knew was that an old, fancy looking black Volga with white wheels is a ghost car, that shows up randomly and whoever is in it, is kidnapping children, but first asks them what's the time or how to get to a certain spot, to get them to come closer. Then, the doors open, the kid is pulled inside, and the car speeds away or even disappears into thin air. As a young adult, from friends from other cities, I've heard that in some versions the car is driven by Satan, that asks people about time and if you answer, he declares you'll die tomorrow at this time, and if you don't, he kills you on the spot. Some also said, that you can survive if you answer "It's God's hour". Other versions had the trafficking and organ theft element to them, because some said that the children are kidnapped to have their blood drain to treat rich Germans' leukemia. Another local tale, which isn't terribly specific, is of the ghost of White Lady, since my town has an XIII c. castle, that's extremely weathered and ruined, basically only outer walls are still left, which is a perfect background for the ghost story. The White Lady is supposed to be a woman, maybe a princess, that was engaged to someone for political reasons, but was in love with another. She committed suicide by jumping from the castle's window, either on the day of her wedding or when she heard her lover was killed in battle [the version probably depends on whether or not the person telling it knew, that white wasn't a wedding color back then] and you can still see her sometimes in said windows. This one is a local version of a common myth, but it's kinda special to me, because when I was on a field trip there in primary school, I decided to try and make other kids believe she's real, as many of them as possible and it worked so well, that not only many kids said they saw her, but at some point I psyched myself so much, that when I was taking a picture, I could have sworn I saw some white figure for a second on the walls - and I don't even believe in ghost, nor I ever did, so there's power of suggestion for you. Another local tale is related to Pan Twardowski, a mythical nobleman from Polish folklore, that was a powerful warlock that sold his soul to the Devil for magical powers. Where I come from, in medieval times, there used to be silver mines, but they were flooded, so, according to the legends, that silver was in fact all the riches that Pan Twardowski told the Devil to get from our region. The Devil was also told to hide the treasures for Pan Twardowski, so he covered it with sand and considered it done. [Un]fortunately, local people found out about the silver and started digging and mining the area. The Devil was trying to stop them with different tricks, but people would still always come back to the mines, so he decided to redirect a local river, called Baba [which roughly translated to hen/old woman/hag] and flood the mines. This made the mines completely unaccessible and unusable, but also costed Pan Twardowski his treasure. And from that tale we have the saying "Gdzie diabeł nie może, tam babę pośle", meaning "Where the devil can't go, he sends a woman".
I think is interesting how there’s this “trope” in American urban legends to have a place cursed/haunted bc “it was built on a Native American burial ground” or something similar. It almost feels like subliminal guilt in the collective consciousness. Like even the early pioneers were a little creeped out by the death and destruction required for them to occupy someone else’s land
@@themostdevious-t1dhow old are you lmao at least use new slurs so people know what you’re talking about. When someone has to look up what the word means to get offended you know you’re out of touch gramps
There's also the unfortunate tropes of historical oversimplification and Marxist thinking, like suggesting that death was the only method to obtain land in that time period, or that collective guilt could be warrented for one specific group of people for events so ancient. They can stain an otherwise perfectly rational and interesting idea, like yours, by approximation. But I see your point. And death, especially events resulting in the deaths of many people, is bound to bring stories of terrible fear, in legend form or otherwise.
@@Brandon-1996 I mean I’m all for historical nuance but like 1) how exactly does “Marxist thinking” factor in here? 2) I did mention destruction, and the phrase was a catch-all for the various (ethically questionable at best) methods that resulted in the land being available to pioneers and 3) less than 200 years ago is hardly ancient. And it was certainly not ancient during the 1800s when people started telling legends about curses and burial grounds.
@@skylark7921 To your third point, it's fine if you prefer "a long time ago" to account for 200-300 years ago over "ancient", but I was saying that there are a lot of people, at least in the US, who like to play the blame game for a long time ago conflicts they think are directly relevant today, without any consideration for nuance, and their frustrations are always directed poorly, at least what's shown in the news. Marxism poisons healthy conversation about the past and the present in the US by keeping racism on life support. I didn't say you were doing that.
One great example of an urban legend having a great impact on a huge fantasy world is The a puppet master episode of atla! This one random town won’t journey through the woods because people disappear during the full moon. One crazy old man has a first hand testimony and never got over it. Love it!
In a D&D campaign I ran (which was a horror game set in an active but monster-overrun asylum), there was a legend among the asylum patients of a man who fell into a grain thresher and had most of his skin cut off, but he survived and got some of his skin sewn back on. After he (somewhat) recovered, he began killing people he blamed for his accident, causing him to be committed to the asylum, where he either eventually died, or remains locked up in isolation somewhere. This story is completely untrue. Or, at least it was until some unrelated stuff happened that made the asylum get infused with energies from the Dimension of Dreams, causing some dream mists to coalesce and form a dangerous imitation of this previously imaginary creature.
Did you do this on purpose? "When they tell them why they tell them who they tell them to. How they rationalize them weaponize them who listens to them, too." This is a melodic rhyme!
I live in the capital of Nova Scotia in Canada and the city's covered in old war forts and old historical buildings that keep being renovated to stay looking the way they did when they were first built. A lot of the houses are these huge Victorian mansions that have essentially becomes shared apartments for students now. The city's myths revolve around ghosts, more than anything- some examples being a priest's face forever stuck in a window because he died from glass shattering inward during the Halifax explosion; another being about a soldier's wife who appears in a war fort because her husband was a soldier and married before he died just a few months later. There's also a myth about tunnels running under Citadel Hill and into the harbour, but most people know this is false. Halifax does a lot of ghost tours, so I hear about these a lot. When it comes to the Halifax Explosion, we also have so many stories that they've all turned into myths themselves- myths about normal people trying to save each other. You kind of can't go anywhere without hearing at least one story.
Hey your videos and OSPs trope series have been very instrumental in helping me write and build my own stories. I'm getting my sister your Catalogue for the End of Humanity for Christmas and am very excited to read it as well
My grandmama is from Appalachia and she taught me that those mountains are old and we don't know what's hiding in them. So we were taught a few basic rules to stay safe from the ancient cryptids. Don't go out at night. If you do, stay on the path. If you think you heard your name, no you didn't. If you think you heard a baby crying or a woman wailing, no you didn't. Go out in a group. And if you do encounter something, don't panic and always back away slowly. Other things I'm sure I've forgotten
There's an older MMO called Secret World Legends which uses a lot of smaller-scale urban myths and legends as part of its urban fantasy worldbuilding. Sure you have big massive threats like world-ending Cthulhu-esque star-eating monsters, but just as often there's creepy moth monsters and werewolves and ghosts and other local-scale creatures roaming about the world that are just as much of a threat.
@@AC-hj9tvcombat was very hit or miss depending on person but the actual atmosphere and lore is 100% they have detective style investigation missions where you need to research online to figure things out like seeing the hands of a clock pointing to specific places in a church and then researching a specific passage from the bible that correlates to the hand of the clock to find the clue of where to go next. It can be very interesting or very boring depending on what you like
There was an urban legend once that this crazy cat lady had lots of cats in the neighborhood. One day her grandson started selling these delicious dumplings that everyone loved but her cats were mysteriously disappearing. Supposedly the cats were moved out of the house because of an incoming storm, and the area was prone to flooding, and they didn't want to have to worry about the cats getting caught up in the deluge. After the house got flooded, the grandson stopped selling dumplings because they had to repair the house from the damage. Then one day he started selling them again, but they tasted different but were still tasty. However now the old lady and all her cats were gone, and one day the grandson disappeared as well.
In my home town there's a vacant lot on a hill where the biggest house in the neighborhood once stood. People called it the "big house on the hill." It was built by the village founder as a residence for his large family, but then it burned down a few years ago and the village tore down the remains as they were seen as an "eyesore." I always imagined going to explore the burned wreckage, but I wonder how many secrets were lost when it was demolished, and how many remain...
Local Urban Legend: Charlotte, NC The auditorium of Northwest School of the Arts is haunted by the ghost of Sadie. There are different versions of her life & death, but the most common is that she was a performing arts strident of some kind who was in the school after hours, went to the rafters above the stage where lights are hung, and fell. She was caught in the wires and strangled to death, and now continues to haunt the auditorium & other parts of the school where students learn theater, dance, & music. Almost all of her stories amount to childish jump scares, but in my favorite she was a benevolent ghost. Chris was starting their first day of Theater Tech, and arrived late. They were told they had to go to the grid, the upper portion of the school’s black box theater, but Chris only knew the building. As Chris looked for the door upstairs they heard a knock & opened it. It was the door to balcony leading to the grid, and both were empty. To this day my friend Chris says Saidie is a bro for helping them out
I live In east Africa in Ethiopia. there is this myth in this district called terro mosque named after an imam who taught there, crows, ravens and vultures are no strange occurrence considering the many butcher shops and kurt restaurants around there, there is this legend of this creature called " Aba Wululu" an 8 ft tall man with two left feet wearing a black trench coat with the head of a crow or raven who kidnap's kids randomly to cutoff their ears for food and takes their right feet to see if he can fit his. i used to genuinely believe this as a kid still sends chills down my spine.
At the university I went to. In the science building. There are rumors of a haunted elevator. Back in the 50s, the school used to house cadavers for the med students to practice on. This was up on the 6th floor in a room you could access through the elevator. The front door in the elevator led to the main hall, and the back door led to the room where the bodies were stored. When they moved the med school to a different building, the cadaver room was turned into a normal storage room and was locked up. But sometimes, students in the building late at night will report that when they went to use the elevator. It wouldn't take them where they wanted to go. All the lights would flash, and the button for the 6th floor would be pressed. The elevator goes there, and the back door opens. Revealing the padlocked door leading to the storage room that used to house the dead. I've been on one of these rides.
@@nostalji93scientists aren't infallible to superstition and myth. Ask quantum physics majors how many of their peers had odd ideas about psionic powers or whatnot.
@@kirknay sure. But in general they are a lot less eager to believe in a supernatural cause. My first guess is the elevator is broken or the story is straight up bs. Which isn't bad, because it's a cool spooky story. Just doesn't sound like something a scientist would come up with.
@nostalji75 The elevator probably just has an electrical issue that causes it to set to default position, with all doors open at the top floor.. but the superstition isn't hurting anyone. I knew people who refused to use that elevator, but they just used another path upstairs (the other elevator, stairs, or escalator). Science majors are just as susceptible to superstition as anyone else. Our brain is built to keep us safe and looks for danger by scanning for faces in the dark and connecting unrelated info. When I experienced it, I was going from the basement to the ground floor at around 11 at night. It stopped at the ground floor but didn't open. After a few seconds, I started hitting the "door open" button, but nothing happened. Then the lights flickered, and it started going up. I knew it was probably an electrical issue. But probably doesn't keep you safe, so my brain was readying me for something horrible to happen. I imagined that it would go to the top floor and then fall like the tower of terror. Or the doors would open, and an unnaturally tall and thin creature, a slenderman, would be waiting for me. At the top floor, the doors opened to a dark hallway and behind me to a padlocked door. I could be surrounded, and I was vulnerable. After what seemed like an eternity of standing there, I hit the button for the ground floor, and everything began working as normal again. Knowing what was probably going on didn't make the experience less unnerving.
@@nostalji93 From what I've heard, every lab has some weird shrine somewhere where one of the machines only works if you stack action figures on it, or can't be used at the same time as the microwave in the other room despite zero scientific reasoning for that.
Great video! I saw Dracula in the thumbnail and I was thinking that I would love to see your analysis about Castlevania's subversion of themes. For example vampires should be the monsters in that world but actually humans do things just as bad or often worse than the vampires. The Church itself speaks of God while commiting terrible crimes. Also it's a great show to talk about imperfect characters that we end up rooting for
Highest point of my area is Webster Hills. We Potawatomi tribes call it Monster Mountain. Ghosts and wendigo have been seen and people go missing in the area. Realtors have a small issue of selling houses on the east side of the hills, where things are seen at night.
I love how much footage you used from What Remains of Edith Finch. That's a fantastic game that I absolutely love, and it actually fits really well with the theme with this whole legend of the family curse. I always thought it was a niche piece of media, so it's good to see it get recognition.
The only urban legend i can think pf in my area is from high school, where somebody found either an empty room or a pit that was accessed through a locker, and a mythology about the fight club that used to be in it sprang up out of nowhere. It probably helped that it was the first year of that student body being moved to a different, old building, so there eas nobody around to explain what was going on with strange structures. There was also the JROTC shootinv range in the basement, which was only used as a tornado shelter and still had old posters in it
My high school had a similar legend, but the room was accessed by the sketchy as all heck stairs on the auditorium stage. You can see the path the stairs and sketchy walkways make going up, and they go up probably about 50 feet or so, and the whole thing looks like it'll all collapse with even an ounce of extra weight. There's a door that's locked at the bottom of those stairs for a good reason lmao. Simultaneously, theres stairs going under the auditorium, into an area quite literally called "The Dungeon." The cheerleading uniforms, extra furniture, and like 90% of the smaller theatre props are stored down there. Some of the rooms seem haunted or from a horror movie. The lighting down there adds to it. There's a tiny bathroom and water fountain down there, which we were advised against using, and the pipes leaked into the theatre storage room. There's a gate at the top of those stairs that's typically locked, even while most of the doors down there are also locked. There's also supposedly access to secret tunnels under the school/town via the teacher's lounge, discovered on accident through a hole in the wall. Supposedly, some guy used to enter the school using it, but the hole didn't exist when I investigated as a student, and even some of the staff didn't even know these stories or if there was any inkling of truth behind them
In my city, Downey, CA, there is an abandoned neighborhood asylum that is fenced off. Some say the place was abandoned by patients and personnel, as if in a trance, simultaneously. Others say one of the inmates locked the doors and started a fire and you can still hear them pounding the doors at night. Others say they were spooked by something that the staff left even the papers, and left the patients at the mercy of the Spook. This has made many teenagers, paranormal seekers, and thrill junkies to jump he fences and explore the fenced plot of of land, but cops patrol the asylum.
I'm from Illinois and we have not so much a myth but a story that all the adults tell kids about "corn demons" that live in the fields. It's meant to keep kids from going into the fields and getting lost/hurt (especially during harvest season, you do NOT want to get caught in a combine)
There's a road between my hometown and a nearby town that has had a ton of horrific accidents at one specific spot that isn't particularity dangerous. Many people who survived these accidents say they crashed after either seeing people appear in front of their car or heard random screams inside their vehicle.
Good video. For those who want to learn more on this topic, the TH-cam channel Storied has a series called Monstrum where they cover creatures from folklore and analyze them. A great series. Also, nice Castlevania thumbnail. A good show and great game series.
I used to live in a small town in Australia halfway inbetween two major cities, there was a bridge on a major highway built over an Aboriginal site wherein bad spirits lay. From 12am - 3am fog tends to creep onto the bridge exactly where the site resides. There was a woman who supposedly unalived on that bridge who can be seen standing in the middle of the road from time to time the survivors of firry crashes have accounted to seeing her, hell sometimes even I think I see her but from the hours of 12 - 3 you know you want to drive a little more cautiously
I'm from Santiago (Chile), and my country (much like the entirety of Latinoamerica) is filled with legends of all kinds, and, like the landscape, vary a lot from region to region, though some are shared throughout. Probably the biggest, which exists from Mexico to Patagonia, is La Llorona (literally The Cryer), the mourning spirit of woman who's children drowned (or in some versions she drowned in a rage and then repented) now looking, always crying, for other kids near water (why also depends on the version). In my country, aside from el cuero, we have from fiery birds from the desert of Atacama, a shapeshifting witch trapped in the form of a black sheep with a woman's face. In my city, there is the belief that if the thorn crown of the Cristo de Mayo (May Christ, also known as Señor de los Temblores, or Lord of the Earthquakes), a statue of Jesus, which fell from the head to the neck in an earthquake during colonial times, is put back in its place, it will start another one equally devastating. The statue was then owned by a powerful colonial landowner, Catalina de los Ríos, who became another infamous legend in her own right; La Quintrala. And in the Archipielago of Chiloé in the south they have one for everything; ghost ships (el Caleuche), old magicians that whose head can turn into a bird and fly to kill (el Tue-Tue), a sea-woman that helps fishermen (la Pincoya), etc., etc. The mixture between spanish and other european, indigenous, and after a few centuries, distinctly chilean and latinoamerican cultures, is what determined most of our culture and traditions, including the legends. Sorry it's so long but all those stories are part of what inspired me to write my own book. Keep up the good work, you've really helped me! :).
Saying tapestry after telling the El Cuero myth was an unintended pun. It really was to beware people about falling into the river (whool cloth, cold water, alone and no one to give you a hand, mortal trap). South Chile Is full of myths but I have some from the North that I like. The Princess and the Bull (La princesa y el Toro), about a maid screaming from help in the middle of the pampa (desert) to protect her from a danger, if you acept, a Bull like a demon comes running down the hill; you run, they clash and explode in flames. North was full of salitre, people starting fires without knowing it saw the blue flames spreading around and said it was the devil on the land; also the myth could come from the géisers and rocks falling down the mountain with esethquakes
There's a building in my hometown which is an abandoned warehouse/office building called the Campana building. It's a horizontal rectangle with a big turret in the center several stories high. Real weird looking. I grew up hearing stories of a woman who jumped from.the top of that tower to her death and that's the reason the building is no longer used. But her soul still haunts the building, especially the basement. Guess where my school held our annual haunted house?
Just learned that I can get your new books at my local bookshop! It's just a small town in Germany and I can buy your book from the local store! Made me really excited and happy for some reason XD Congrats on your successes!
I'm from Arizona, and there are lots of Urban legends, but my absolute favorite is one that I know people who believe. The Superstition Mountains Gold. (There are many variations and even contradictory variations, but such is the case of urban legend.) A while back, there was a man who was obsessed with Gold. Now this man believed he could make the Arizona Gold Rush, just like California's if he only found the gold in some mountains. He was convinced that these mountains would have gold. Now he hired men, but as more and more got injured or killed from mining, no one found anything but rock and dirt. They all left or died. Not the man, see he was obsessed. He dug, all day, every day. So much so that no one even knew where his mine was anymore, as he kept changing locations. Eventually, there was a note. He found his gold. Worth more than millions of dollars. And he was going to keep it. All of it, never would any man see his gold, and then... the man died. People went looking for his gold of course, but they all died out in those mountains. So now they call it the Superstition Mountains, for the superstitious know to stay away. Any who look for the gold will find nothing or find obsession. Looking more and more until eventually, they get close and disappear. That is also why you must never go alone, the desert is dangerous and should you stumble across that gold, you won't make it back. Almost certainly a warning about hiking alone, as doing so is incredibly dangerous thanks to snakes and mountain lions and the heat. Many go missing every year from hiking alone here.
In my hometown, we have a national cemetery which was placed there after the American Civil War. That has its own legends, but interestingly enough there’s a much smaller private cemetery in town that is said to be so violently haunted that the city government has officially closed it and no one is allowed in there anymore. It’s not due to any environmental factors, it’s on very safe ground very close to the town center.
Something I've gotten really into recently is the Cafe and Diner archives, which is an arg about a group finding cryptids to return back to where they came from. It's super cool and has taught me a ton about lots of different urban legends, and believe me, this story is willing to go OUT THERE with its myths. My favourite is probably the Hatman
In Mexico perhaps the most famous is La Llorona. The story says she was a woman who drowned and killed her own children, and after feeling regret she killed herself. Now her ghost wanders near bodies of water and cities, crying out loud "Ay mis hijos", (Ay my children). A cry so eerie and haunting. And the legend says if you hear the cry very loudly and close, is because she is far away, but if you hear the cry far away, she is very close.
I actually set one of my stories in New Jersey (Mainly just because it's a U.S. state that has auroras apparently but still). Considering Wkipedia doesn't even have a page for the Green Lady discussed in this video, would you happen you know anything more about her or other legends from your state?
Down here in Louisiana we have the Rougarou. A werewolf like creature with an alligator head, that can shape shift into anything. It lives deep in the swamp and tends to prey on pets that stray too far from home. Some people even believe that the Rougarou use to be a native. Because we have two native tribes that predated Morgan city. A peaceful tribe that lived mostly on clams and oysters and a more aggressive tribe that hunt and fight. Even the old part of Morgan city was built on top of the largest Indian shell mounds.
I've found the uncanny valley helps a lot with the creation of these legends. Something that at first appearance looks normal, but on closer reflection, something is just slightly off. A deer with a neck slightly too long and eyes too close together. A lot of it mythology uses this too.
I heard a nearly identical story to the Green Lady in the woods myth when I was living in Burnaby (Canada) with my sister and I used to take my nephew to the big park there. People said a woman lost her kids in the park and sometimes you could still hear her crying out for them. Honestly, I always thought they must have been hearing the sound of the skytrain's screeching off in the distance.
i'm from the bay area (around san francisco), and according to my dad, there used to be this ghost, murphy, who would just ransack stores for no reason (the first example i could think of was ToysRUs). I don't know much about murphy, but he's got a local marketplace named after him. Aside from that, my dreams feel more like urban legends more than anything real. I once had this dream involving a gift shop, and on one of the shelves was a doll thing, with a bobbling head with a really creepy face, similar to those cats with the wavy hands you see, except it was waving a knife up and down. if the knife is pointed upward, you shall live. if it's pointed down, you shall die on the spot. any attempts to remove the doll would result in the knife pointing downward. It's weird. It felt like some kind of japanese folktale. but yeah, i wish this sorta thing was a legit urban legend bc this terrified me
A world of pure Euhemerism? Does that count morality tales or fables - so the culture would have to wait for children to go missing to have a “Hansel and Gretel” story? Sounds like an opportunity for the God of Lies to step in, if there is an assumption in-universe that all legends are based in truth.
The southern part of my state has the same mountains that were apart of the mountains in Ireland and scottland. Both practice similar "magics" independent of each other
I appreciate this video! There’s a special charm that comes with stories like these, when grownups paint their porch roofs blue to keep the haints away or when kids don’t go alone into the swamp where the Searcy Monster lives - it’s being willing to believe in a little magic. I think that’s so important for people now (especially now) to hold on to these charms. Even in a technological, data-driven world, we are still the same kind of humans that once lived out in the woods somewhere.
There is a park not far from my house. nothing special just a playset some swings but when I was a young kid to a teen I would hear stories of a young girl that would play with kids and then be gone in moments. the legend has it she died far before the park was built and the children playing brought her spirit back to life. My friend and I went one night to try to talk to her, I can't explain some of the things i saw and heard that night.
I think it'd make you happy to know that your videos very often inspire some new story ideas for me. This one in particular has me working on a new short story, so thank you.
In Tacoma WA we all grow up hearing about the gigantic octopus that lurks under the Narrows Bridge waiting to snatch night boaters. In Tuscon and Mesa AZ I saw lots of kokopellis in the decor and architecture. They're little trickster spirits native to the area and they're territorial, so if they see other kokopellis on the building they'll leave it alone.
I'm from La Paz, Bolivia I like how you incorporated this story, there's a film telling the story of one of the people who took this room, I do recommend you to watch it. Another legend here is the "s'ullus" that also shows up in the movie, they are people who are given alcohol as a friendly gesture by a friend and when they are blackout drunk, they are dumped into the foundation of a new building as a sacrifice to Pachamama to keep the building safe forever
We had a dwarven smith, who was never seen by anyone. You simply put a broken tool or something next to a boulder close to where it lived. The next day the tool would be repaired and you had to put your payment on the boulder. That was until one stingy farmer didn't pay, from that day forward the "Schmied im Hone" never repaired anything again. Lots of regional myths in Lower Saxony revolve around dwarves, giants or the devil, but we also have the wild hunt here.
when I was a kid, I would often hear of stories about this tree that cuts between two roads and often causes a lot of traffic. when i ask my dad why they won't just cut the tree down, he said that they tried but for some reason the workers would get sick or end up in some unfortunate accident. people think the tree must be housing a forest spirit or such.
Can't even remember the last time I heard anyone talk about "Tomair Trees"/"Waking Trees" or if people in my city even tell it anymore, nor have I been able to find anyone talk about it online. From what I can recall it was started by early German, Finish, and Irish settlers to Northern Ontario, Canada when their cultures started to mix in a new environment. As Canada was a nation full of vast forests unlike what have been seen in Germany and Ireland for centuries, nor most of Finland, parents needed ways to keep kids out of the forests and for this legend out of the forest during thunderstorms and/or out from under trees that would attract lightning or have old, heavy, dead branches falling on top of them. So combining old Germanic stories of sacred trees, the Norse God Thor, and the Irish's knowledge of Caill Tomair (Thor's Grove) and Shakespeare's Macbeth these new communities started telling how during thunderstorms Thor's lightning would bring trees to life/ wake them up and they would kill any living creature close enough to catch before quickly falling back asleep. In some telling the trees would uproot themselves and start to give chase to children before falling back asleep and come crashing to the ground (explaining uprooted trees found after a large storm), which also may have been more recently influenced by the Ents of Lord of the Rings more than Macbeth at this point. In others they awoke to help Thor catch his dinner, but being unaware that he did not eat humans, and so he would leave any dead child lying under the tree that likely killed them, to be given to the wolves and bears of the area so they might grow large enough to be a worthy hunt one day.
My town has two urban myths: a graveyard that you can only see driving one way down a certain road, and a scary stories to tell in the dark book that people have but no one knows how they got them.
Well, weirdly enough, I’m from Sweden and the first thing I thought off was the myth of Blåkulla and the witches who lured children there. But I feel you’ve already heard of that one…
One of the best pieces of advice for worldbuilding that I've ever heard is "Give your world its own mythos" Some things are true, some are exagerated, some false and some are left vague or not even written down and just hinted at
In my hometown there is this old train station that my dad calls the ghost station. It was being made until it wasn't and was abandoned for unknown reason. safe to say I look out for it when ever we ride past it
I'm suddenly reminded of people living in remote areas who were asked as part of a study how they knew not to eat the poisonous fish. They didn't answer 'because they're poisonous, duh', they said 'because you'll get cursed. Everyone knows that'. That may sound similar but it's a difference between first hand knowledge and observation with second or third hand knowledge and information that is passed down from one generation to the next. It's part of their verbal heritage in passing down stories that teach lessons and pass on important information in a way that will stick with children and adults alike. I think it's pretty cool how important story telling has been for humans as long as we've been talking and maybe even before then.
My town was built on an Indian burial ground, parts of it was cemeteries before it was all bull dozed over and housing was put on top of it all We found a ceramic floor with a massive pentaground carved in under the carpet There was a cat lady that abducted children There is an abandon aysilum back in the woods and we use to say that some of the patients still wandered the woods, it was just a homeless population but it still scared children when they found abandon camps
I think that local legends and myths are such a great way to show a society living in a specific place from many different angles. A simple legend can explain the emotions and behaviors of the characters. One of the best examples of creating a world so intensely immersed in legends and myths that it actually is a whole world for the people in the story is shown in the book "Folk" by Zoe Gilbert. It's an amazing read!
In my hometown there is the legend of the Big Rock. It was originally a Grizzly Bear that said he could jump from the mainland to Vancouver Island but just fell short and turned into a rock.
My town doesn’t have any interesting stories, unfortunately. Or at least none that I know. We do have the story about the church that split over fried chicken. Which is essentially that there was an argument over predetermination and it got heated during a church lunch and someone yelled out that they were predetermined to eat a piece of fried chicken they were holding and the person they were arguing with yelled “no you’re not” and snatched it and ate it first. The other story is the Bridge to Nowhere. Which sounds awesome but is actually just a footbridge built in the middle of downtown that was supposed to lead to an apartment complex but the developers ran out of money before anything was built on the other side so it was literally a bridge that lead nowhere. Just boring bits of mundanity.
Actually, the bridge to nowhere would be a great starting point for an urban fantasy setting. That something mysterious happened to the building that had once been at the other end.
13:18 I grew up in Springfield but surprisingly never heard the story of the axe murderer and I was obsessed with urban legends in high school. I'll have to look into this further.
I like reading about urban legends because of their unique take on things, and there have been times where I used several plots tied to those stories. Enjoyed the video 😊
My favorite will always be The Beast of Gevaudan, because even though we don't know for certain what we was, we know more than a hundred people died in 18th century France, and it even had political impact
In South Korea there was an abandoned asylum at a small town named Gon Ji Am. It was *the* most rumored supernatural place in the country with countless witnesses of poltergeists, ghosts and visitors going insane. There's even a pretty good movie about it. I'm saying "there was" because the place was purchased and demolished by a major logistics company. Now there's an enormous warehouse and transportation hub that can cover the entire nation. Dozens of thousands of people are working 24/7, and not a single sighting of supernatural phenomenon. Moral of the story: when you have difficulty expelling ghosts, use firepower and capital. If that doesn't work, use more firepower and capital.
Oh! My old high school had a small shallow basement area where it was said people were hidden. Similar to the Underground Railroad or hiding people from the soldiers during ww2. I forgot about that.
Not interacted with enough, but I think I can use it into a ground work for a story I sketched out. Thank you. It's been bouncing around my head for years, and I excited this this option.
In my town, some say that a disembodied ghost which takes the form of a live action Atla dvd preys on the unsuspecting fans who love good writing and characters.
One of my absolute favorite spinoff stories is the novel "Marauder" from the Battletech franchise. A military science fiction setting lacking the supernatural and demonic forces of Warhammer may seem like a strange place to have urban myth and eldritch horror, yet the story adds an air of mystery to the setting without outright subverting it's hard(ish) scifi setting. Everything that takes place in it could plausibly be explained by a combinations of terrible luck, superstition, technology gone awry, madness and dismissed as a campfire story, yet it undeniably adds some depth to the lore of the setting to know that the unknown exists even in the far future. I also find the idea of haunted, malevolent technology to be fascinating.
In New England, we have a giant cat with a spiked ball on the end of his tail, and we call him the wumpus cat or the dingball. You must never pet or feed him, or else he will become very happy and wag his tail, smashing anyone nearby.
I am from Kriens, Switzerland, at the foot of the mountain Pilatus. We have two stories here. Of course, there is a dragon on the top of the mountain. The other story is that the name Pilatus came from Pontius Pilate. Legends say that after his death, he was thrown into the Oberalpsee (Top Alp lake). That's why we have such harsh weather on the mountain.
Super excited to hear Volume III of Writing and World Worldbuilding is out! I love the first two and can't wait to add the third to my collection. 😁 As for urban legends, I don't know of any in my hometown, but I wholeheartedly agree that these legends are ample source material for writing, whether it's horror or fantasy, and I love researching new ones to play with in my own writing. 😃
Rhinelander Wisconsin has the Hodag. It has the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end. It was eventually revealed as a hoax, but it's still talked about.
i am writing a story based around the urban legends of my home town. most of the legend's (excluding ghost stories which just happen in old buildings) happen in a local mall, which is one of the top five largest malls in the world, or the massive river valley which is undeveloped and runs thru the center of town. the valley is bigger than central park several time over and widely known to be dangerous, filled with mines massive erosion and similar, so it makes a good set piece
I said this in a reply to another comment, but wanted to put it up here for the general public as well. In a setting where monsters really exist, I think myths and local legends would still exist, but inverted. People would have tales of a forest, a mountain, a cabin somewhere, that is completely safe and that the monsters never approach. Either way, it's escapism; they would just be trying to escape from a different reality. And this type of myth could still be used to "teach" children, just in the opposite direction: instead of "if you're bad, those monsters will come and get you," it would be "if you're good, you'll be safe from these monsters!"
You briefly mentioned It, I think the movie version, but the book itself is such a beautiful example of urban myth, with whole sections devoted to the history of the town and how Pennywise had shown up in it
Working in forestry just outside of my city for a couple of summers, I did experience some genuinely weird things. A witch hanged a leg of a lamb on the front door of our break-shed and carved runes into the doorframe; My boss encountered a Rasputin kind of guy when driving there at night; and one day a hole just... appeared by a spot we frequented, just to name a few.
I've lived in Maryland my whole life and the small town that inspired and served as the backdrop for the Blair Witch Project is just a couple miles from my hometown. We get fans visiting or going on pilgrimages to reenact the movie, and my town hosted an anniversary viewing at the local theatre a few years ago. However, in my youth, I've was in Boy Scouts and have been on many camping trips. In the first year or two in my new troop, my scoutmaster's husband was very excellent in telling campfire stories, his most favorite being about experiments done in the local military base (which primarily engages in medical research). The subject of these stories are a group of test monkies that were mutated as a result of the experiments and escaped the labs. Some were found dead and mummified in unlikely places like air vents and attics, but not all of them were accounted for. It just so happens the base has patches of forests and the base is not too far off from a mountain; where we were camping. . . Did I see glowing eyes while he was telling that story? My high school English teacher was also an urban legend and ghost story junkie, and one of his hobbies is investigating and camping at cryptid sightings and haunted places. We still keep in touch.
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What's an urban legend from YOUR hometown?
Create your own urban legends and myths using Campfire! They're literally built for this sort of thing :D www.campfirewriting.com/write/for-novelists?TH-cam&HFM_Q4_23
Not so much an urban legend in my home town but someone was accused of being a witch and was burnt to death in the car park of the local pub
In my town, there is a myth about a group of ghosts who would, all naked and covered in oil so the police couldn't catch them, rob vehicles that would stop at the local pub. It's my favourite local myth because of how silly it is; it sounds like a modern internet meme
😢ycmicCcmccm
Man i'm from bolivia and I can say that elephant graveyards are real, they are not an urban legends, it cost like 10 us dollars and after the first bucket they give you the choice to back down and if you choose not to they locked the door and live you there to die
Upon ys❤csctd
I like the way _Gravity Falls_ deals with urban legends, where sometimes they're true, sometimes they're not, and sometimes there are *things* out there that aren't written down.
There is _so much_ any writer can learn from Gravity Falls, and especially when it comes to the urban legends. We see them through the eyes of two outsiders, through the townspeople (and especially through the ones who aren't taken too seriously, like McGucket), through the people who profit off them, and the people who fall victim to them. Sometimes even through the eyes of the legends themselves. I adore the different perspectives we get on them, whether they're true or not.
Absolutely brilliant series.
The best part is Gravity Falls also has a bunch of urban legends that are in some capacity true, but very different from how everyone expects them to be. Like the unicorns, where there's the one pretentious unicorn that turns out to just be straight out lying to them when the rest are mostly pretty chill and kinda mean. Or when in episode 1 there's all this build up to Mabel's new boyfriend being a zombie or a vampire or something and then it's a bunch of kidnapping gnomes. Equally a threat but never quite what you expect
Hell yeah.
Fantasy worlds with actual monsters tend to overlook this since the cryptids themselves are typically creatures or monsters to begin with
Yeah but mych like how we still have myths around animals that spiral into full blown myths, they could too
A lot of monster myths are boogeyman myths meant to scare kids into behaving. I can see a fantasy novel still incorporating one as part of their story’s culture.
@@SEAZNDragonIt isn't actually that simple though. Pretty much all such mythologies come from essentially distortions of tales of some real life event that then gets synchronized to explain it and reinforce some set of behaviors. If you had an actual fantasy world you frankly would probably have even more tales based on actual things rather than stuff like a inundated section of forest that becomes a deadly bog sucking people down to caverns eroded beneath.
When monsters really exist, I think the myths and local legends would just be inverted. People would have tales of a forest, a mountain, a cabin somewhere, that is completely safe and that the monsters never approach. Either way, it's escapism; they would just be trying to escape from a different reality.
And this type of myth could still be used on children, just in the opposite direction: instead of "if you're bad, those monsters will come and get you," it would be "if you're good, you'll be safe from these monsters."
On the other hand a lot of myths are meant to warn people away from abandoned buildings (dangerous for lots of reasons, especially medical facilities that could still have dangerous chemicals or radioactive materials), or to advise against specific behaviors like chasing strange noises in the Appalachians is a great way to get lost and die of exposure or predation.
The other half of "campfire ghost stories" is that people enjoy spooking and scaring people. So making up a ghost story is considered fun to do. People also have evolutionary "caution/paranoia" that makes them prone to being freaked out buy creepy stuff, and to try and explain it.
Because of this even if everyone knows about monsters in your world the way we know about animals, that doesn't mean their can't be ghost stories.
I actually created an "urban legend" in my childhood. Our old house was quite loud - floors creaking even when no one is walking, wind slamming doors shut, a cat that sometimes walked as loudly as an adult human (especially on the stairs), etc. So, when my two friends were staying over and got spooked by the noises, I just casually said "oh, that's my dead aunt". I never had any aunts - dead or alive - so it wasn't a specific person, just an unidentified aunt slamming the doors shut and making the calling boards creak. Somehow it stuck and now we say "oh, that's just the aunt" to calm ourselves when we hear an unidentified noise in the house.
I absolutely love this
Top cringe
shut up
@@AC-hj9tv
@@AC-hj9tvstop talking about yourself, it’s narcissistic
@@awkwardukulele6077 people would rather listen to me than your sad story of your pathetic life
Never once had I considered to separate my fantasy monsters into existing and legend. The idea between “Be careful, there is a hideous monster dragon that lives in that lake. “ to instead “Legend of so an so serpent has made our people wary of those waters for centuries” leaves for sure a bigger impact to the character and the reader. The worldbuilding being important for sure, but the tension from the “unsure” is fantastic! Thanks Tim!!
Pokemon almost does that with its legendary and mythical monsters. They're 100% actually real, but it comes close, the narrative treats them like there's doubt, up until the plot has you interacting with them.
I actually wrote one of those recently for my book. A story about a tribesman who lured his wife into a forest protected by wood elves, killing her and blaming the elves for his crime. He ends up getting punished twice, first by the elves and later by his tribe-in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Its main purpose was to explain why the tribes treat the local forest the way they do, but there's also a lot of covert world building sprinkled in, like the fundemental differences between how humans and elves think and what they value as well as local customs. Its a secondary avenue of world building I love to include here and there
What's the book if you can tell.
not sure this counts as an urban legend: but my family is from East Germany and my mother always told me, that you cannot do any laundry (especially big sheets or table cloth) between christmas and epiphany (january 6th). She never told me why, because this was just, what her grandmother had told her.
years later i found out that this myth is acutally connected to the wild hunt, that chases through the sky in the time between the years (Rauhnächte in German). and when you hang out the laundry to dry, these spirits might get caught in the sheets, get upset and curse you for the next year.
When I told my mother about it, she had no idea, that this was the origin of the laundy-ban - this part of the story had just been lost in time
The urban legends can vary through geography too. In my country (Belgium), we have tales of werewolves, ghosts and witches. But they're mostly pretty innocent, playful even. Werewolves jump on your back and make you carry them until you're tired. Ghosts are just sinners who need to do a task (and the living can help them). Witches are mostly talking cats, or flying women.
There are two creatures that kill you, especially children. The necker (waterdemon with a LOT of variations), drags you down under water till you drown. And the Hopdevils (demons of the crops, with a some of variations as well), kidnaps or eat children.
Why are these so malicious? First of all, they're ment to scare children. But, even as the country is full of towns and cities now, it used to be a place with a lot of rivers and swamps where most inhabitants were farmers. Water and crops were part of their daily life. And drowning and afternoon heat killed people. It makes sense their legends reflect that.
I'm from Costa Rica. My favorite legends are about the duendes, little people who look like very small children and live in coffee plantations or woodland close to human dwellings. They can be helpful, like household spirits, or mischievous. They are said to lure children to play with them and get them lost. There is also El Cadejos (Kahdeyhos), a huge phantom black dog with goat hooves, that haunts men who walk at night in lonely roads. He was once a man, cursed due to his wild ways, and he must make sure other men keep to the good path by scaring them out of their socks. He never appears to women.
Thank you for sharing!! I love hearing these kinds of stories, especially getting to hear them from people who actually are from the area of the urban legend
I was just about to comment about the Cadejos. Has been a favorite of mine since childhood
The Philippines also has a version of Duwendes, where they are mostly there as like Karmic Entities of the woods or generally natural settings, where they curse humans who intrude on their lands or annoy them.
Some homes host duwendes too, and can still curse them right in their own home.
Que linda mi CR 🇨🇷
Now that you mentioned "El Cadejos", I thought about "la cegua" or "la mona" which are similar "entities" that appear to drunk guys
Duwendes? 💀🇵🇭
If you think about it, innaccurate myths and legends in a world with magic would be much like science misinformation in our world
Edit: one variation of this I haven't seen as often is when the accepted idea about the magic system, which are in-universe functional and useful in the same way newtonian physics is useful on earth, but actually an incomplete picture of what is going on, the way newtonion physics breaks down if you go too big and relativity breaks down if you go too small. But that's something I'm trying to do in my fantasy, where the magic system's official explanation proves to be flawed and limited, and discovering more about it expands the power sets of the characters in a way that is believable. They even discover a subset of magic that is entirely focused on helping the user understand magic, but which was too meta to be easily discovered on its own
Something as simple as a person that hates magic telling lies about it, "You know the shield spell is dangerous to the caster, right? Last time someone casted it suffocated in their own bubble. Nothing can penetrate the shield's walls, not even air."
This Is something Witcher novels do a lot.
@@petrfedor1851Brandon Sanderson does it too I think
There is two lines from Gargoyles about this sort of thing. In the Mid series, one of the characters state "All things are true" about something they run across. Later, in the comic series, King Arthur comments "All things are true. Few things are accurate".
This is a great point
In my hometown, there's an old legend about a lizard that became so so large that it started to devour the sheep and other animals, the town's people were scared and couldn't find any solution, except a famous thief, who forged a plan to create false sheep filled with dynamite inside of them (in some retellings he fed real sheep dynamite), he then waited for the lizard to eat the sheep and the thief beats the beast by making it explode. The legend is called 'El lagarto de la magdalena'.
Sounds like the legend of Wawel dragon from Krakow, Poland, much like in your legend the dragon was eating livestock so a shoemaker took a sheep, put sulfur inside and when the dragon ate it, it became so thirsty it drank and drank until it burst.
So similar!
@@Vexy7whoa!
Damn bro i love this real history shit
@@Vexy7 exactly, they even drink "La sangre del lagarto" - "blood of the lizard" which is basically polish "grzaniec", this story sounds the same as the one about "smok wawelski", probably because of jewish community who moved between Krakow and Jaen
Sounds like the plot of a Loony Toons cartoon. :)
My hometown doesn’t have many stories attached to it anymore (it’s mostly become a suburb of a much larger city in more recent years), but the town is cut in two by a valley called the Hungry Hollow. It’s very marshy and forested with a creek and some trails going through it. That’s about all the legends we still have talk about.
Anyways, the Hollow is generally treated as if it were an entity itself. During the day it’s perfectly content and even welcoming to people. However, come night if you live on one of the streets near the Hungry Hollow you lock your doors. If you cross the bridge, either do so with someone else around or in a car, and do not stop. Bring any and all pets inside. Even ignoring the folklore, pets do go missing around it. Do not walk it’s trails. The Hollow is much less friendly to the town at night.
(Probably stems from the shenanigans of the local coyote population that lives in the Hollow and can’t be dislodged)
That feels like a great one to do a short horror film about. Big city couple move next to the Hollow and get warned about how to treat it but they laugh it off thinking it's just superstition. But as the new folks keep breaking the rules, everything becomes more unsettling each night until the climax where the lady is walking her dog on the trails as darkness falls and something starts following her. She end up running for her life until she gets onto the road and a car almost runs her over. Its the local sheriff and he finally explains that the Hollow is full of coyotes, that the stories are to scare the kids into being safe, and offers her and the dog a lift back home. And in the last shot, as the car pulls away, the camera focuses into the darkness of the Hollow to reveal - just for a second - something that is *not* a coyote, lurking. And cut to black.
Okay, that’s creepy. And awesome
"When they tell them,
Why they tell them,
Who they tell them to.
How they rationalize them,
Weaponize them,
Who listens to them, too."
Poetry on point
My grandmother told me that when she was little girl in her home she was tortured by a monster called "Dydko Straw Legs". This monster looked like a hybrid of a human and a spider. He had a large head and moved on many legs made of straw. Dydko kidnapped children who were walking alone in suburban forests. My grandmother lived on the outskirts of Warsaw throughout WW II. My great-grandparents told her these stories so that she wouldn't go into the forest to look for food. Meeting soldiers or stepping on a mine meant death.
😭😭😭 Grandma
The black ambulance kinda unlocked a childhood memory for me.
I'm from Poland, so central/eastern Europe, depends who's asking. In my childhood town, there were tales of a black car, but it wasn't an ambulance, it was a black Volga. Details vary depending on who's telling the story. The version I knew was that an old, fancy looking black Volga with white wheels is a ghost car, that shows up randomly and whoever is in it, is kidnapping children, but first asks them what's the time or how to get to a certain spot, to get them to come closer. Then, the doors open, the kid is pulled inside, and the car speeds away or even disappears into thin air.
As a young adult, from friends from other cities, I've heard that in some versions the car is driven by Satan, that asks people about time and if you answer, he declares you'll die tomorrow at this time, and if you don't, he kills you on the spot. Some also said, that you can survive if you answer "It's God's hour". Other versions had the trafficking and organ theft element to them, because some said that the children are kidnapped to have their blood drain to treat rich Germans' leukemia.
Another local tale, which isn't terribly specific, is of the ghost of White Lady, since my town has an XIII c. castle, that's extremely weathered and ruined, basically only outer walls are still left, which is a perfect background for the ghost story. The White Lady is supposed to be a woman, maybe a princess, that was engaged to someone for political reasons, but was in love with another. She committed suicide by jumping from the castle's window, either on the day of her wedding or when she heard her lover was killed in battle [the version probably depends on whether or not the person telling it knew, that white wasn't a wedding color back then] and you can still see her sometimes in said windows. This one is a local version of a common myth, but it's kinda special to me, because when I was on a field trip there in primary school, I decided to try and make other kids believe she's real, as many of them as possible and it worked so well, that not only many kids said they saw her, but at some point I psyched myself so much, that when I was taking a picture, I could have sworn I saw some white figure for a second on the walls - and I don't even believe in ghost, nor I ever did, so there's power of suggestion for you.
Another local tale is related to Pan Twardowski, a mythical nobleman from Polish folklore, that was a powerful warlock that sold his soul to the Devil for magical powers. Where I come from, in medieval times, there used to be silver mines, but they were flooded, so, according to the legends, that silver was in fact all the riches that Pan Twardowski told the Devil to get from our region. The Devil was also told to hide the treasures for Pan Twardowski, so he covered it with sand and considered it done. [Un]fortunately, local people found out about the silver and started digging and mining the area. The Devil was trying to stop them with different tricks, but people would still always come back to the mines, so he decided to redirect a local river, called Baba [which roughly translated to hen/old woman/hag] and flood the mines. This made the mines completely unaccessible and unusable, but also costed Pan Twardowski his treasure. And from that tale we have the saying "Gdzie diabeł nie może, tam babę pośle", meaning "Where the devil can't go, he sends a woman".
I think is interesting how there’s this “trope” in American urban legends to have a place cursed/haunted bc “it was built on a Native American burial ground” or something similar. It almost feels like subliminal guilt in the collective consciousness. Like even the early pioneers were a little creeped out by the death and destruction required for them to occupy someone else’s land
@@themostdevious-t1dwhat
@@themostdevious-t1dhow old are you lmao at least use new slurs so people know what you’re talking about. When someone has to look up what the word means to get offended you know you’re out of touch gramps
There's also the unfortunate tropes of historical oversimplification and Marxist thinking, like suggesting that death was the only method to obtain land in that time period, or that collective guilt could be warrented for one specific group of people for events so ancient. They can stain an otherwise perfectly rational and interesting idea, like yours, by approximation.
But I see your point. And death, especially events resulting in the deaths of many people, is bound to bring stories of terrible fear, in legend form or otherwise.
@@Brandon-1996 I mean I’m all for historical nuance but like 1) how exactly does “Marxist thinking” factor in here? 2) I did mention destruction, and the phrase was a catch-all for the various (ethically questionable at best) methods that resulted in the land being available to pioneers and 3) less than 200 years ago is hardly ancient. And it was certainly not ancient during the 1800s when people started telling legends about curses and burial grounds.
@@skylark7921
To your third point, it's fine if you prefer "a long time ago" to account for 200-300 years ago over "ancient", but I was saying that there are a lot of people, at least in the US, who like to play the blame game for a long time ago conflicts they think are directly relevant today, without any consideration for nuance, and their frustrations are always directed poorly, at least what's shown in the news.
Marxism poisons healthy conversation about the past and the present in the US by keeping racism on life support. I didn't say you were doing that.
One great example of an urban legend having a great impact on a huge fantasy world is The a puppet master episode of atla! This one random town won’t journey through the woods because people disappear during the full moon. One crazy old man has a first hand testimony and never got over it. Love it!
In a D&D campaign I ran (which was a horror game set in an active but monster-overrun asylum), there was a legend among the asylum patients of a man who fell into a grain thresher and had most of his skin cut off, but he survived and got some of his skin sewn back on. After he (somewhat) recovered, he began killing people he blamed for his accident, causing him to be committed to the asylum, where he either eventually died, or remains locked up in isolation somewhere.
This story is completely untrue. Or, at least it was until some unrelated stuff happened that made the asylum get infused with energies from the Dimension of Dreams, causing some dream mists to coalesce and form a dangerous imitation of this previously imaginary creature.
Did you do this on purpose?
"When they tell them
why they tell them
who they tell them to.
How they rationalize them
weaponize them
who listens to them, too."
This is a melodic rhyme!
I live in the capital of Nova Scotia in Canada and the city's covered in old war forts and old historical buildings that keep being renovated to stay looking the way they did when they were first built. A lot of the houses are these huge Victorian mansions that have essentially becomes shared apartments for students now. The city's myths revolve around ghosts, more than anything- some examples being a priest's face forever stuck in a window because he died from glass shattering inward during the Halifax explosion; another being about a soldier's wife who appears in a war fort because her husband was a soldier and married before he died just a few months later. There's also a myth about tunnels running under Citadel Hill and into the harbour, but most people know this is false. Halifax does a lot of ghost tours, so I hear about these a lot. When it comes to the Halifax Explosion, we also have so many stories that they've all turned into myths themselves- myths about normal people trying to save each other. You kind of can't go anywhere without hearing at least one story.
Hey your videos and OSPs trope series have been very instrumental in helping me write and build my own stories. I'm getting my sister your Catalogue for the End of Humanity for Christmas and am very excited to read it as well
My grandmama is from Appalachia and she taught me that those mountains are old and we don't know what's hiding in them. So we were taught a few basic rules to stay safe from the ancient cryptids. Don't go out at night. If you do, stay on the path. If you think you heard your name, no you didn't. If you think you heard a baby crying or a woman wailing, no you didn't. Go out in a group. And if you do encounter something, don't panic and always back away slowly. Other things I'm sure I've forgotten
There's an older MMO called Secret World Legends which uses a lot of smaller-scale urban myths and legends as part of its urban fantasy worldbuilding. Sure you have big massive threats like world-ending Cthulhu-esque star-eating monsters, but just as often there's creepy moth monsters and werewolves and ghosts and other local-scale creatures roaming about the world that are just as much of a threat.
Oh yea was it good? Always wanted to play it
@@AC-hj9tvcombat was very hit or miss depending on person but the actual atmosphere and lore is 100% they have detective style investigation missions where you need to research online to figure things out like seeing the hands of a clock pointing to specific places in a church and then researching a specific passage from the bible that correlates to the hand of the clock to find the clue of where to go next.
It can be very interesting or very boring depending on what you like
There was an urban legend once that this crazy cat lady had lots of cats in the neighborhood. One day her grandson started selling these delicious dumplings that everyone loved but her cats were mysteriously disappearing. Supposedly the cats were moved out of the house because of an incoming storm, and the area was prone to flooding, and they didn't want to have to worry about the cats getting caught up in the deluge. After the house got flooded, the grandson stopped selling dumplings because they had to repair the house from the damage. Then one day he started selling them again, but they tasted different but were still tasty. However now the old lady and all her cats were gone, and one day the grandson disappeared as well.
Do you mind telling me where you're from so I can look into this story more?
In my home town there's a vacant lot on a hill where the biggest house in the neighborhood once stood. People called it the "big house on the hill." It was built by the village founder as a residence for his large family, but then it burned down a few years ago and the village tore down the remains as they were seen as an "eyesore." I always imagined going to explore the burned wreckage, but I wonder how many secrets were lost when it was demolished, and how many remain...
Local Urban Legend: Charlotte, NC
The auditorium of Northwest School of the Arts is haunted by the ghost of Sadie. There are different versions of her life & death, but the most common is that she was a performing arts strident of some kind who was in the school after hours, went to the rafters above the stage where lights are hung, and fell. She was caught in the wires and strangled to death, and now continues to haunt the auditorium & other parts of the school where students learn theater, dance, & music.
Almost all of her stories amount to childish jump scares, but in my favorite she was a benevolent ghost. Chris was starting their first day of Theater Tech, and arrived late. They were told they had to go to the grid, the upper portion of the school’s black box theater, but Chris only knew the building. As Chris looked for the door upstairs they heard a knock & opened it. It was the door to balcony leading to the grid, and both were empty. To this day my friend Chris says Saidie is a bro for helping them out
I live In east Africa in Ethiopia. there is this myth in this district called terro mosque named after an imam who taught there, crows, ravens and vultures are no strange occurrence considering the many butcher shops and kurt restaurants around there, there is this legend of this creature called " Aba Wululu" an 8 ft tall man with two left feet wearing a black trench coat with the head of a crow or raven who kidnap's kids randomly to cutoff their ears for food and takes their right feet to see if he can fit his.
i used to genuinely believe this as a kid still sends chills down my spine.
At the university I went to. In the science building. There are rumors of a haunted elevator.
Back in the 50s, the school used to house cadavers for the med students to practice on. This was up on the 6th floor in a room you could access through the elevator. The front door in the elevator led to the main hall, and the back door led to the room where the bodies were stored.
When they moved the med school to a different building, the cadaver room was turned into a normal storage room and was locked up. But sometimes, students in the building late at night will report that when they went to use the elevator. It wouldn't take them where they wanted to go. All the lights would flash, and the button for the 6th floor would be pressed. The elevator goes there, and the back door opens. Revealing the padlocked door leading to the storage room that used to house the dead.
I've been on one of these rides.
Rumors of a haunted elevator in the science building? I guess people where testing you if you are lost. ^^
@@nostalji93scientists aren't infallible to superstition and myth. Ask quantum physics majors how many of their peers had odd ideas about psionic powers or whatnot.
@@kirknay sure. But in general they are a lot less eager to believe in a supernatural cause. My first guess is the elevator is broken or the story is straight up bs. Which isn't bad, because it's a cool spooky story. Just doesn't sound like something a scientist would come up with.
@nostalji75 The elevator probably just has an electrical issue that causes it to set to default position, with all doors open at the top floor.. but the superstition isn't hurting anyone. I knew people who refused to use that elevator, but they just used another path upstairs (the other elevator, stairs, or escalator).
Science majors are just as susceptible to superstition as anyone else. Our brain is built to keep us safe and looks for danger by scanning for faces in the dark and connecting unrelated info.
When I experienced it, I was going from the basement to the ground floor at around 11 at night. It stopped at the ground floor but didn't open. After a few seconds, I started hitting the "door open" button, but nothing happened. Then the lights flickered, and it started going up. I knew it was probably an electrical issue. But probably doesn't keep you safe, so my brain was readying me for something horrible to happen. I imagined that it would go to the top floor and then fall like the tower of terror. Or the doors would open, and an unnaturally tall and thin creature, a slenderman, would be waiting for me. At the top floor, the doors opened to a dark hallway and behind me to a padlocked door. I could be surrounded, and I was vulnerable. After what seemed like an eternity of standing there, I hit the button for the ground floor, and everything began working as normal again. Knowing what was probably going on didn't make the experience less unnerving.
@@nostalji93 From what I've heard, every lab has some weird shrine somewhere where one of the machines only works if you stack action figures on it, or can't be used at the same time as the microwave in the other room despite zero scientific reasoning for that.
Great video! I saw Dracula in the thumbnail and I was thinking that I would love to see your analysis about Castlevania's subversion of themes. For example vampires should be the monsters in that world but actually humans do things just as bad or often worse than the vampires. The Church itself speaks of God while commiting terrible crimes. Also it's a great show to talk about imperfect characters that we end up rooting for
Love the opening
Highest point of my area is Webster Hills. We Potawatomi tribes call it Monster Mountain. Ghosts and wendigo have been seen and people go missing in the area. Realtors have a small issue of selling houses on the east side of the hills, where things are seen at night.
I love how much footage you used from What Remains of Edith Finch. That's a fantastic game that I absolutely love, and it actually fits really well with the theme with this whole legend of the family curse. I always thought it was a niche piece of media, so it's good to see it get recognition.
The only urban legend i can think pf in my area is from high school, where somebody found either an empty room or a pit that was accessed through a locker, and a mythology about the fight club that used to be in it sprang up out of nowhere. It probably helped that it was the first year of that student body being moved to a different, old building, so there eas nobody around to explain what was going on with strange structures.
There was also the JROTC shootinv range in the basement, which was only used as a tornado shelter and still had old posters in it
My high school had a similar legend, but the room was accessed by the sketchy as all heck stairs on the auditorium stage. You can see the path the stairs and sketchy walkways make going up, and they go up probably about 50 feet or so, and the whole thing looks like it'll all collapse with even an ounce of extra weight. There's a door that's locked at the bottom of those stairs for a good reason lmao.
Simultaneously, theres stairs going under the auditorium, into an area quite literally called "The Dungeon." The cheerleading uniforms, extra furniture, and like 90% of the smaller theatre props are stored down there. Some of the rooms seem haunted or from a horror movie. The lighting down there adds to it. There's a tiny bathroom and water fountain down there, which we were advised against using, and the pipes leaked into the theatre storage room. There's a gate at the top of those stairs that's typically locked, even while most of the doors down there are also locked.
There's also supposedly access to secret tunnels under the school/town via the teacher's lounge, discovered on accident through a hole in the wall. Supposedly, some guy used to enter the school using it, but the hole didn't exist when I investigated as a student, and even some of the staff didn't even know these stories or if there was any inkling of truth behind them
In my city, Downey, CA, there is an abandoned neighborhood asylum that is fenced off. Some say the place was abandoned by patients and personnel, as if in a trance, simultaneously. Others say one of the inmates locked the doors and started a fire and you can still hear them pounding the doors at night. Others say they were spooked by something that the staff left even the papers, and left the patients at the mercy of the Spook.
This has made many teenagers, paranormal seekers, and thrill junkies to jump he fences and explore the fenced plot of of land, but cops patrol the asylum.
I'm from Illinois and we have not so much a myth but a story that all the adults tell kids about "corn demons" that live in the fields. It's meant to keep kids from going into the fields and getting lost/hurt (especially during harvest season, you do NOT want to get caught in a combine)
There's a road between my hometown and a nearby town that has had a ton of horrific accidents at one specific spot that isn't particularity dangerous. Many people who survived these accidents say they crashed after either seeing people appear in front of their car or heard random screams inside their vehicle.
Good video. For those who want to learn more on this topic, the TH-cam channel Storied has a series called Monstrum where they cover creatures from folklore and analyze them. A great series.
Also, nice Castlevania thumbnail. A good show and great game series.
@@ThorRagnarok-de9ydsure, but I don't have to listen about pride month and the "power of pride" in every third video of his
@@ThorRagnarok-de9yd
What are you two talking about pride propaganda? Storied is not a channel about LGBTQ stuff.
@@ThorRagnarok-de9yd
I know, but his comment is gone.
@@ThorRagnarok-de9yd
Okay, as I thought. He is just homophobic.
@@Ninjaananas well, that is obvious.
I used to live in a small town in Australia halfway inbetween two major cities, there was a bridge on a major highway built over an Aboriginal site wherein bad spirits lay. From 12am - 3am fog tends to creep onto the bridge exactly where the site resides. There was a woman who supposedly unalived on that bridge who can be seen standing in the middle of the road from time to time the survivors of firry crashes have accounted to seeing her, hell sometimes even I think I see her but from the hours of 12 - 3 you know you want to drive a little more cautiously
Me: *does literally anything*
HFM: *releases video*
Me: “whelp gotta put everything aside again”
I'm from Santiago (Chile), and my country (much like the entirety of Latinoamerica) is filled with legends of all kinds, and, like the landscape, vary a lot from region to region, though some are shared throughout. Probably the biggest, which exists from Mexico to Patagonia, is La Llorona (literally The Cryer), the mourning spirit of woman who's children drowned (or in some versions she drowned in a rage and then repented) now looking, always crying, for other kids near water (why also depends on the version). In my country, aside from el cuero, we have from fiery birds from the desert of Atacama, a shapeshifting witch trapped in the form of a black sheep with a woman's face. In my city, there is the belief that if the thorn crown of the Cristo de Mayo (May Christ, also known as Señor de los Temblores, or Lord of the Earthquakes), a statue of Jesus, which fell from the head to the neck in an earthquake during colonial times, is put back in its place, it will start another one equally devastating. The statue was then owned by a powerful colonial landowner, Catalina de los Ríos, who became another infamous legend in her own right; La Quintrala. And in the Archipielago of Chiloé in the south they have one for everything; ghost ships (el Caleuche), old magicians that whose head can turn into a bird and fly to kill (el Tue-Tue), a sea-woman that helps fishermen (la Pincoya), etc., etc. The mixture between spanish and other european, indigenous, and after a few centuries, distinctly chilean and latinoamerican cultures, is what determined most of our culture and traditions, including the legends. Sorry it's so long but all those stories are part of what inspired me to write my own book. Keep up the good work, you've really helped me! :).
Whoa!! Can we buy the book? Also, is the sheep woman hot? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Saying tapestry after telling the El Cuero myth was an unintended pun. It really was to beware people about falling into the river (whool cloth, cold water, alone and no one to give you a hand, mortal trap).
South Chile Is full of myths but I have some from the North that I like. The Princess and the Bull (La princesa y el Toro), about a maid screaming from help in the middle of the pampa (desert) to protect her from a danger, if you acept, a Bull like a demon comes running down the hill; you run, they clash and explode in flames. North was full of salitre, people starting fires without knowing it saw the blue flames spreading around and said it was the devil on the land; also the myth could come from the géisers and rocks falling down the mountain with esethquakes
There's a building in my hometown which is an abandoned warehouse/office building called the Campana building. It's a horizontal rectangle with a big turret in the center several stories high. Real weird looking. I grew up hearing stories of a woman who jumped from.the top of that tower to her death and that's the reason the building is no longer used. But her soul still haunts the building, especially the basement. Guess where my school held our annual haunted house?
Just learned that I can get your new books at my local bookshop! It's just a small town in Germany and I can buy your book from the local store! Made me really excited and happy for some reason XD Congrats on your successes!
I'm from Arizona, and there are lots of Urban legends, but my absolute favorite is one that I know people who believe. The Superstition Mountains Gold. (There are many variations and even contradictory variations, but such is the case of urban legend.)
A while back, there was a man who was obsessed with Gold. Now this man believed he could make the Arizona Gold Rush, just like California's if he only found the gold in some mountains. He was convinced that these mountains would have gold. Now he hired men, but as more and more got injured or killed from mining, no one found anything but rock and dirt. They all left or died. Not the man, see he was obsessed. He dug, all day, every day. So much so that no one even knew where his mine was anymore, as he kept changing locations. Eventually, there was a note. He found his gold. Worth more than millions of dollars. And he was going to keep it. All of it, never would any man see his gold, and then... the man died.
People went looking for his gold of course, but they all died out in those mountains. So now they call it the Superstition Mountains, for the superstitious know to stay away. Any who look for the gold will find nothing or find obsession. Looking more and more until eventually, they get close and disappear. That is also why you must never go alone, the desert is dangerous and should you stumble across that gold, you won't make it back.
Almost certainly a warning about hiking alone, as doing so is incredibly dangerous thanks to snakes and mountain lions and the heat. Many go missing every year from hiking alone here.
In my hometown, we have a national cemetery which was placed there after the American Civil War. That has its own legends, but interestingly enough there’s a much smaller private cemetery in town that is said to be so violently haunted that the city government has officially closed it and no one is allowed in there anymore. It’s not due to any environmental factors, it’s on very safe ground very close to the town center.
Something I've gotten really into recently is the Cafe and Diner archives, which is an arg about a group finding cryptids to return back to where they came from. It's super cool and has taught me a ton about lots of different urban legends, and believe me, this story is willing to go OUT THERE with its myths. My favourite is probably the Hatman
You're not kidding, this really is a great way to breathe life into a story!!
In Mexico perhaps the most famous is La Llorona. The story says she was a woman who drowned and killed her own children, and after feeling regret she killed herself. Now her ghost wanders near bodies of water and cities, crying out loud "Ay mis hijos", (Ay my children). A cry so eerie and haunting. And the legend says if you hear the cry very loudly and close, is because she is far away, but if you hear the cry far away, she is very close.
Never thought I'd hear Tim talk about my good old state of New Jersey in any context, but here we are.
Great vid like usual, I love your content Tim!
I actually set one of my stories in New Jersey (Mainly just because it's a U.S. state that has auroras apparently but still). Considering Wkipedia doesn't even have a page for the Green Lady discussed in this video, would you happen you know anything more about her or other legends from your state?
Down here in Louisiana we have the Rougarou. A werewolf like creature with an alligator head, that can shape shift into anything. It lives deep in the swamp and tends to prey on pets that stray too far from home. Some people even believe that the Rougarou use to be a native. Because we have two native tribes that predated Morgan city. A peaceful tribe that lived mostly on clams and oysters and a more aggressive tribe that hunt and fight. Even the old part of Morgan city was built on top of the largest Indian shell mounds.
I've found the uncanny valley helps a lot with the creation of these legends. Something that at first appearance looks normal, but on closer reflection, something is just slightly off. A deer with a neck slightly too long and eyes too close together. A lot of it mythology uses this too.
I heard a nearly identical story to the Green Lady in the woods myth when I was living in Burnaby (Canada) with my sister and I used to take my nephew to the big park there. People said a woman lost her kids in the park and sometimes you could still hear her crying out for them. Honestly, I always thought they must have been hearing the sound of the skytrain's screeching off in the distance.
i'm from the bay area (around san francisco), and according to my dad, there used to be this ghost, murphy, who would just ransack stores for no reason (the first example i could think of was ToysRUs). I don't know much about murphy, but he's got a local marketplace named after him. Aside from that, my dreams feel more like urban legends more than anything real. I once had this dream involving a gift shop, and on one of the shelves was a doll thing, with a bobbling head with a really creepy face, similar to those cats with the wavy hands you see, except it was waving a knife up and down. if the knife is pointed upward, you shall live. if it's pointed down, you shall die on the spot. any attempts to remove the doll would result in the knife pointing downward. It's weird. It felt like some kind of japanese folktale. but yeah, i wish this sorta thing was a legit urban legend bc this terrified me
I'm from the Bay too, but I've never heard of Murphy. Do you happen to remember which town it was?
@@d.b.4671Sunnyvale, I think
In my fantasy world, nearly everly single legend or myth has a basis in reality. They are all real.
Even in the real world legends and myths have some basis in reality.
A world of pure Euhemerism? Does that count morality tales or fables - so the culture would have to wait for children to go missing to have a “Hansel and Gretel” story?
Sounds like an opportunity for the God of Lies to step in, if there is an assumption in-universe that all legends are based in truth.
All myths have a bit of reality in it, over time that amount changes but there was always that hint.
The southern part of my state has the same mountains that were apart of the mountains in Ireland and scottland. Both practice similar "magics" independent of each other
I appreciate this video!
There’s a special charm that comes with stories like these, when grownups paint their porch roofs blue to keep the haints away or when kids don’t go alone into the swamp where the Searcy Monster lives - it’s being willing to believe in a little magic. I think that’s so important for people now (especially now) to hold on to these charms. Even in a technological, data-driven world, we are still the same kind of humans that once lived out in the woods somewhere.
There is a park not far from my house. nothing special just a playset some swings but when I was a young kid to a teen I would hear stories of a young girl that would play with kids and then be gone in moments. the legend has it she died far before the park was built and the children playing brought her spirit back to life. My friend and I went one night to try to talk to her, I can't explain some of the things i saw and heard that night.
I always love to see Over the Garden Wall in the wild.
I was so giddy listening to this, and I think it gave me an idea for my series I've been stuck on for awhile
I think it'd make you happy to know that your videos very often inspire some new story ideas for me. This one in particular has me working on a new short story, so thank you.
In Tacoma WA we all grow up hearing about the gigantic octopus that lurks under the Narrows Bridge waiting to snatch night boaters.
In Tuscon and Mesa AZ I saw lots of kokopellis in the decor and architecture. They're little trickster spirits native to the area and they're territorial, so if they see other kokopellis on the building they'll leave it alone.
As a chilean, when you said "el cuero" I was like "hey! We have that." And it turns out you were talking about our thing. o.o
The timing is so perfect, I just began working on my world
I'm from La Paz, Bolivia
I like how you incorporated this story, there's a film telling the story of one of the people who took this room, I do recommend you to watch it.
Another legend here is the "s'ullus" that also shows up in the movie, they are people who are given alcohol as a friendly gesture by a friend and when they are blackout drunk, they are dumped into the foundation of a new building as a sacrifice to Pachamama to keep the building safe forever
We had a dwarven smith, who was never seen by anyone. You simply put a broken tool or something next to a boulder close to where it lived.
The next day the tool would be repaired and you had to put your payment on the boulder.
That was until one stingy farmer didn't pay, from that day forward the "Schmied im Hone" never repaired anything again.
Lots of regional myths in Lower Saxony revolve around dwarves, giants or the devil, but we also have the wild hunt here.
when I was a kid, I would often hear of stories about this tree that cuts between two roads and often causes a lot of traffic. when i ask my dad why they won't just cut the tree down, he said that they tried but for some reason the workers would get sick or end up in some unfortunate accident. people think the tree must be housing a forest spirit or such.
Can't even remember the last time I heard anyone talk about "Tomair Trees"/"Waking Trees" or if people in my city even tell it anymore, nor have I been able to find anyone talk about it online. From what I can recall it was started by early German, Finish, and Irish settlers to Northern Ontario, Canada when their cultures started to mix in a new environment. As Canada was a nation full of vast forests unlike what have been seen in Germany and Ireland for centuries, nor most of Finland, parents needed ways to keep kids out of the forests and for this legend out of the forest during thunderstorms and/or out from under trees that would attract lightning or have old, heavy, dead branches falling on top of them. So combining old Germanic stories of sacred trees, the Norse God Thor, and the Irish's knowledge of Caill Tomair (Thor's Grove) and Shakespeare's Macbeth these new communities started telling how during thunderstorms Thor's lightning would bring trees to life/ wake them up and they would kill any living creature close enough to catch before quickly falling back asleep. In some telling the trees would uproot themselves and start to give chase to children before falling back asleep and come crashing to the ground (explaining uprooted trees found after a large storm), which also may have been more recently influenced by the Ents of Lord of the Rings more than Macbeth at this point. In others they awoke to help Thor catch his dinner, but being unaware that he did not eat humans, and so he would leave any dead child lying under the tree that likely killed them, to be given to the wolves and bears of the area so they might grow large enough to be a worthy hunt one day.
My hometown has a werewolf story and the next town over has a wraith story, really neat that my home has such a rich local history.
My town has two urban myths: a graveyard that you can only see driving one way down a certain road, and a scary stories to tell in the dark book that people have but no one knows how they got them.
Well, weirdly enough, I’m from Sweden and the first thing I thought off was the myth of Blåkulla and the witches who lured children there.
But I feel you’ve already heard of that one…
One of the best pieces of advice for worldbuilding that I've ever heard is "Give your world its own mythos"
Some things are true, some are exagerated, some false and some are left vague or not even written down and just hinted at
In my hometown there is this old train station that my dad calls the ghost station. It was being made until it wasn't and was abandoned for unknown reason. safe to say I look out for it when ever we ride past it
I'm suddenly reminded of people living in remote areas who were asked as part of a study how they knew not to eat the poisonous fish.
They didn't answer 'because they're poisonous, duh', they said 'because you'll get cursed. Everyone knows that'.
That may sound similar but it's a difference between first hand knowledge and observation with second or third hand knowledge and information that is passed down from one generation to the next.
It's part of their verbal heritage in passing down stories that teach lessons and pass on important information in a way that will stick with children and adults alike.
I think it's pretty cool how important story telling has been for humans as long as we've been talking and maybe even before then.
My town was built on an Indian burial ground, parts of it was cemeteries before it was all bull dozed over and housing was put on top of it all
We found a ceramic floor with a massive pentaground carved in under the carpet
There was a cat lady that abducted children
There is an abandon aysilum back in the woods and we use to say that some of the patients still wandered the woods, it was just a homeless population but it still scared children when they found abandon camps
I think that local legends and myths are such a great way to show a society living in a specific place from many different angles. A simple legend can explain the emotions and behaviors of the characters. One of the best examples of creating a world so intensely immersed in legends and myths that it actually is a whole world for the people in the story is shown in the book "Folk" by Zoe Gilbert. It's an amazing read!
In my hometown there is the legend of the Big Rock. It was originally a Grizzly Bear that said he could jump from the mainland to Vancouver Island but just fell short and turned into a rock.
My town doesn’t have any interesting stories, unfortunately. Or at least none that I know. We do have the story about the church that split over fried chicken. Which is essentially that there was an argument over predetermination and it got heated during a church lunch and someone yelled out that they were predetermined to eat a piece of fried chicken they were holding and the person they were arguing with yelled “no you’re not” and snatched it and ate it first. The other story is the Bridge to Nowhere. Which sounds awesome but is actually just a footbridge built in the middle of downtown that was supposed to lead to an apartment complex but the developers ran out of money before anything was built on the other side so it was literally a bridge that lead nowhere. Just boring bits of mundanity.
Actually, the bridge to nowhere would be a great starting point for an urban fantasy setting. That something mysterious happened to the building that had once been at the other end.
13:18 I grew up in Springfield but surprisingly never heard the story of the axe murderer and I was obsessed with urban legends in high school. I'll have to look into this further.
I like reading about urban legends because of their unique take on things, and there have been times where I used several plots tied to those stories. Enjoyed the video 😊
My favorite will always be The Beast of Gevaudan, because even though we don't know for certain what we was, we know more than a hundred people died in 18th century France, and it even had political impact
In South Korea there was an abandoned asylum at a small town named Gon Ji Am. It was *the* most rumored supernatural place in the country with countless witnesses of poltergeists, ghosts and visitors going insane. There's even a pretty good movie about it.
I'm saying "there was" because the place was purchased and demolished by a major logistics company. Now there's an enormous warehouse and transportation hub that can cover the entire nation. Dozens of thousands of people are working 24/7, and not a single sighting of supernatural phenomenon.
Moral of the story: when you have difficulty expelling ghosts, use firepower and capital. If that doesn't work, use more firepower and capital.
Oh! My old high school had a small shallow basement area where it was said people were hidden. Similar to the Underground Railroad or hiding people from the soldiers during ww2. I forgot about that.
13:48 that rhythm and flow is fire
Not interacted with enough, but I think I can use it into a ground work for a story I sketched out. Thank you. It's been bouncing around my head for years, and I excited this this option.
In my town, some say that a disembodied ghost which takes the form of a live action Atla dvd preys on the unsuspecting fans who love good writing and characters.
One of my absolute favorite spinoff stories is the novel "Marauder" from the Battletech franchise. A military science fiction setting lacking the supernatural and demonic forces of Warhammer may seem like a strange place to have urban myth and eldritch horror, yet the story adds an air of mystery to the setting without outright subverting it's hard(ish) scifi setting. Everything that takes place in it could plausibly be explained by a combinations of terrible luck, superstition, technology gone awry, madness and dismissed as a campfire story, yet it undeniably adds some depth to the lore of the setting to know that the unknown exists even in the far future. I also find the idea of haunted, malevolent technology to be fascinating.
In New England, we have a giant cat with a spiked ball on the end of his tail, and we call him the wumpus cat or the dingball. You must never pet or feed him, or else he will become very happy and wag his tail, smashing anyone nearby.
I am from Kriens, Switzerland, at the foot of the mountain Pilatus. We have two stories here. Of course, there is a dragon on the top of the mountain.
The other story is that the name Pilatus came from Pontius Pilate. Legends say that after his death, he was thrown into the Oberalpsee (Top Alp lake). That's why we have such harsh weather on the mountain.
Castlevania on the thumbnail? Based
Super excited to hear Volume III of Writing and World Worldbuilding is out! I love the first two and can't wait to add the third to my collection. 😁
As for urban legends, I don't know of any in my hometown, but I wholeheartedly agree that these legends are ample source material for writing, whether it's horror or fantasy, and I love researching new ones to play with in my own writing. 😃
When it comes to monsters, the implied or suggested existence of monsters is so much more gripping than the confirmed existence of them
Rhinelander Wisconsin has the Hodag.
It has the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end.
It was eventually revealed as a hoax, but it's still talked about.
I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time
i am writing a story based around the urban legends of my home town. most of the legend's (excluding ghost stories which just happen in old buildings) happen in a local mall, which is one of the top five largest malls in the world, or the massive river valley which is undeveloped and runs thru the center of town. the valley is bigger than central park several time over and widely known to be dangerous, filled with mines massive erosion and similar, so it makes a good set piece
0:41
That's the most American "here" I've heard
Thanks for this help!
I said this in a reply to another comment, but wanted to put it up here for the general public as well.
In a setting where monsters really exist, I think myths and local legends would still exist, but inverted. People would have tales of a forest, a mountain, a cabin somewhere, that is completely safe and that the monsters never approach. Either way, it's escapism; they would just be trying to escape from a different reality.
And this type of myth could still be used to "teach" children, just in the opposite direction: instead of "if you're bad, those monsters will come and get you," it would be "if you're good, you'll be safe from these monsters!"
You briefly mentioned It, I think the movie version, but the book itself is such a beautiful example of urban myth, with whole sections devoted to the history of the town and how Pennywise had shown up in it
Working in forestry just outside of my city for a couple of summers, I did experience some genuinely weird things. A witch hanged a leg of a lamb on the front door of our break-shed and carved runes into the doorframe; My boss encountered a Rasputin kind of guy when driving there at night; and one day a hole just... appeared by a spot we frequented, just to name a few.
I've lived in Maryland my whole life and the small town that inspired and served as the backdrop for the Blair Witch Project is just a couple miles from my hometown. We get fans visiting or going on pilgrimages to reenact the movie, and my town hosted an anniversary viewing at the local theatre a few years ago. However, in my youth, I've was in Boy Scouts and have been on many camping trips. In the first year or two in my new troop, my scoutmaster's husband was very excellent in telling campfire stories, his most favorite being about experiments done in the local military base (which primarily engages in medical research). The subject of these stories are a group of test monkies that were mutated as a result of the experiments and escaped the labs. Some were found dead and mummified in unlikely places like air vents and attics, but not all of them were accounted for. It just so happens the base has patches of forests and the base is not too far off from a mountain; where we were camping. . . Did I see glowing eyes while he was telling that story?
My high school English teacher was also an urban legend and ghost story junkie, and one of his hobbies is investigating and camping at cryptid sightings and haunted places. We still keep in touch.