Bizarre and seemingly unusual events surround Halloween eve and what for centuries has been known as All Hallows Night.
These stories and tales may or may not have really happened and most likely they been exacerbated over time. They have also taken on cultural and regional nuances as the retelling of the story moves around the world and now Internet. Interestingly all of the tales seem to have a moral innuendo or cautionary message to the listener.
Definitely they reflect the collective anxiety of the human soul about potential evil, trauma and fear. Urban legends thrive on fear and are sometimes rooted in an actual event. They are more sinister than folktales and are not bent on explaining the unknown. Instead of just being a story providing an explanation about unknown phenomena they present events that are extremely bizarre and that many times have horrendous endings.
Here are some bizarre Halloween urban legends:
- The famous Earwig Legend - for hundreds of years this tale of the earwig has circulated in various forms. One terrible tale tells of a group of teenagers coming home drunk from a Halloween Party, who think they ran over a dog in the road, but are too drunk to care when it happens. Then the next morning when one of them goes to get in the car sees something hanging from the bottom of the car frame. When he bends down to pull the cloth attached to the axel he screams…for there is the bloody mutilated dead body of a young child. They didn't run over a dog in the road!
- One of the oldest Halloween legends is about “The Hook”. You know how the story goes. Two teens are making out on a desolate road somewhere and they hear something scratching at the door latch outside the car. In the dark they can not see anything, but the girl gets scared and the boy takes her home. When she goes to open the door and get out---yep! There is a hook and arm attached to the door handle.
- The vanishing Hitchhiker tale has circulated for many, many years. A stranger (many times a young woman) is picked up along a lonely road. The driver and passenger have a conversation to pass the time. Then when the driver stops to get gas and returns to the car the passenger has vanished leaving behind some article to verify they were there. The driver recalling his experience at a diner on the road is told many people have encountered the young hitchhiker at that particular location, where they picked her up. She died there 10 years earlier in an accident.
- The Blair Witch Film vanishing is the Urban Legend that says the 3 young film makers of the movie The Blair Witch Project disappeared, never to be found in the woods where their film was found in the camera on the forest floor
- “Teen Ghost of the Sewer” returns to haunt those who post her story on MySpace, is a really spooky Internet Urban Legend. The story goes that 5 girls killed their high school “friend” by pushing down a sewer hole at their school in Wisconsin. They all reported the same story to the police that she fell and so they were never charged with her murder. It is said, when other kids post this story on their MySpace the dead girl haunts them, if they do not post that she was murdered. The legend is further twisted in many retellings by stating o teens have been killed by the tormented girl of the sewer when they posted her story incorrectly!
- A famous Halloween Urban Legend that circulates every year is called “Blue Star”. It is similar to the “Poison Halloween Candy” legends and relies on parent's fears about psychos and Halloween. Usually an e-mail or flier is sent out the week of Halloween with a message that claims drug dealers are targeting middle school kids with a “blue-star” rub on tattoo laced with LSD or Ecstasy which can be absorbed into the body quickly. The message typically is an alarmist warning with capital letters in the heading - "THIS IS VERY SERIOUS!" and "FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE!"
- Here is a good Urban Legend-the story is told of a teenage girl with dreads that has not washed her hair in 3 years. She starts complaining of headaches and severe pain in her scalp. When some friends help her cutoff the dreads they discover a spider had created a nest in her hair and lots of baby spiders hatched, which were eating into her head.
