Urban Legends from the USA, what are some major and minor known ones?

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  5. They say there’s a fearsome critter loving in the woods up north called the Hugag. It’s a moose like animal with a big upper lip so he can’t eat grass properly, and he’s got no elbows or knees, so he can’t lay down. If you come across a tree that’s leaning for no apparent reason, that was a resting place of a Hugag.

  9. Some of these are mythology and Urban legends and incidents :

    The Beast of Bray-road

    The Loveland Frogman

    The Flatwoods Monsters

    The Men in Black

    The Hidebehind

    Lone Pine Mountain Devil

    Fresno Nightcrawlers

    Hugging Molly

    Van Meter Visitor

    The Brown Mountain Lights

    Wendigos

    The Bell Witch

    Storm Hag of Lake Erie

    New England Vampire Scare, Feather Death Crowns, Appalachian Stump Water, Dark Watchers, The Gray Man, Hoop Snake, The Bennington Triangle, Bloodstopping in the Ozarks and Appalachians. E.t.c.

  10. Boggy creek monster in Arkansas. Char man in Ojai California. The beast at Griffith park in LA, California. Hawaiian night marchers. 100 steps cemetery in Indiana. The Grunch in Louisiana.

  17. A minor one from NY state is that of Happy Valley. The legend goes that it used to be a thriving community until a case of Bubonic plague hit and decimated the community. Now it’s haunted as hell. It’s a state forest with roads and trails that you get lost in, supposedly, for hours only to come out a mere 30 minutes later. It just an urban legend but I’ve hung out near the entrance to the trails and it’s just got that foreboding feeling to it.

  20. People buy baby alligators as pets and flush them down the toilet when they get too big, and as a result there are alligators living in the sewers of New York City and/or other major cities.

    On Halloween, malevolent strangers hand out candy laced with poison, needles, or razor blades. (There is actually one confirmed case of this, but it was a father poisoning his own child’s candy in order to collect life insurance)

    Drug dealers distribute lick-and-stick temporary tattoos laced with LSD to children in order to make them addicts.

  22. Here’s a culmination of local folklore I’m aware of:

    By far the most widespread is the Green Man, or Charlie No-Face. The tales say he’s a green-hued man/ghost born from an electrical accident that stalks the roads of Beaver County, PA at night, short-circuiting cars and attacking the occupants. In reality, he was a guy named Ray Robinson who suffered horrific injuries when he was a child in the early 1900s. Most of his face was horribly burned and scarred when he touched trolley wires trying to see into a birds nest. He would walk the road connecting Wampum and Darlington at night and always wore a green jacket. Obviously, seeing him scared more than a few motorists.

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    The second is the Pig Lady of Cannelton. Back in the late 1700s, on a farm near Darlington, in the old mining town of Cannelton, an 18 year old woman came back home to her parents after spending some time in the South. She was supposedly married, but came home without a husband. Her parents left her at home, alone, to go buy livestock in Pittsburgh, and when they returned in a weeks time, she was nowhere to be found. Days went by, and a fowl smell emanated through their home. They found her, headless, beneath the front porch floorboards.

    No one knows who killed her, or why, let alone why they took her head.

    The legend says that if you walk the roads around Cannelton at night, you’ll see a colonial woman wandering the fields. Sometimes she’s without a head, other times has a pig’s head on her shoulders.

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    The third legend is the legend of Mary Black, one of the stories that gave rise to the Bloody Mary myth. She was an Irish immigrant who came over in 1832, and settled in Ellwood City. Standard witch things while alive (animal sacrifice, Satan worship, killed young women, etc), but most of it came from tales told in the 50s and 60s. The stories I’m aware of her in life was that she was a bit eccentric and stern, but a nice woman well into her 80s.

    The legends say that if you say her name three times and then go to sleep, she’ll crawl out of her grave and viciously claw at your face.

    After the stories started circulating, people began vandalizing the graveyard her and her family were buried in. They absolutely destroyed it, to the point that city officials just left it abandoned, and her tombstone had to be taken by the local historic society just to keep it from being lost. Disgusting what some people will do.

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    After that, we have our fair share of haunted bridges. There’s a bridge I cross to go to work that is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a woman who was decapitated by a sign. You’re supposed to stop the car and turn off your headlights around 1:00am and turn them back on and she’ll be standing in the middle of the road before either disappearing from view or jumping over the side of the bridge.

    Then there’s Summit Cut Bridge in Beaver County. It’s just a small bridge over some train tracks. Legend is a woman drove her car over the side and died when her car hit the tracks. You’re supposed to see a woman wearing a white dress wandering the road at night, and people see things on the bridge during the day. My cousins and I went ghost hunting one night when I was 12 and we saw the woman in white walking across the bridge and then disappear before we even got to cross. We just turned around and went back the way we came.

    A few miles away from the Summit Cut Bridge, there’s a road called Foxwood. I know people that say you’re supposed to see a man in blue flannel walking the road who will look back at you with glowing red eyes. People have been seeing him since the 70s at least.

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    The legend of Hell’s Hollow from my hometown.

    My hometown was a major railroad stop in the mid-late 1800s. There was also a stagecoach line that ran through a patch of dense woods going through a hollow right outside of town. Bank coaches and travel coaches picking up money and rich travelers from the trains would get held up by a local gang of highwaymen that operated out of a cave in the hollow. Whatever they stole would be stashed underneath this big, ugly, gnarled oak tree called the Devil’s Rocking Chair. Legend says anything placed under the tree was under watch by the devil himself and could only be taken by the people who put it there. Anyone else was punished.

    Well, the sheriff of the next town over finally managed to catch one of the members of this little gang and he told them everything about the hideout and the drop spot. Sheriff got himself a posse and they went out to stop the robberies. One deputy went out to check the tree and the rest went to the cave. When they reached the cave, however, there was nobody there and no sign it was being used. They waited for the deputy to return, but he hadn’t by nightfall. They searched the area, including the tree, but found nothing. Not even the stolen goods.

    A year or so later, a boy hunting in the woods by the tree found a body lashed to the trunk. It was just a skeleton by the time it was found, so no cause of death could actually be determined. The legend says the devil stayed true to the bargain.

  25. There was the urban legend of the Hatchet House near where I grew up. It’s urban legend meets horror story. I had it told to me when I was young, and I returned the favor. I’m sure there is a story like this throughout America.

    First understand that I grew up on the prairie. It’s inhospitable. In the winter, the night sky is blue and reflects off the snowy corn fields. It’s incredibly dark, but you can make out slight shapes. Or you imagine them. And then there is the wind and cold. So bitterly cold. The feeling of desolation is immense.

    It’s honestly terrifying being out there like that.

    My young cousin (and godson) came to visit from the East Coast. Probably 13 years old at the time. He’d never been anywhere, and he’s dropped into this Mars like landscape with me.

    We were coming home from a game late at night. I decide to teach him a little about history. I pull off the highway onto a gravel road, and then pull into this area near an abandoned schoolhouse. One of those 100 year old schoolhouses.

    I proceed to start telling him the history of this place. Working my way up to the point where the harsh prairie winters had driven the schoolteacher mad, and so she had decapitated her students heads with a hatchet and stored them in the attic. Authorities had found her in the attic of the school after children had gone missing. She sat there, a child’s head on the end of her hatchet handle, and she was just beating the attic floor with a thump thump thump.

    I told him they had put her in prison, but she escaped and was never found.

    We drove back home in silence.

    Later that night, as he was sleeping in this bed in a bedroom he wasn’t familiar with, the winter wind whistling about, I went into the attic and gently thumped three times.

    And then again.

    The phone call that I got from his mother the next day! He didn’t sleep at all. Which is exactly what I did when I heard it.

    And he will do the same for the next generation.

  31. —

    The Hook-Handed murderer/ The Hook/The Hookman:

    A young (often teenage) couple is con-noodling in their car at the local meet-up spot with the radio on. They are getting hot and heavy as a news report is talking about a local man who just managed to escape prison comes on, when they hear a metallic object scrape-scrape-scraping along the side of their car until it stops at the front door, and they hear a click as whatever is out there tries to open the door. Cowering in the back, they dont get a good look at whoever it is, as the scraping sound resumes. The boy (generally) finally musters the courage to climb into the drivers seat and speed off , not stopping until they get to one of their homes, only to get out and realize that the entirety of their car is all scraped up and bloody, and there is a massive metal hook covered in blood embedded in the hood of the car. Right at this point, the radio announcer is finishing up the physical description of the escapee, stating that the individual should be considered armed and very dangorous, as he has a metal hook in place of one of his hands and particularly enjoys using it to gore his young victims.

    *This is a very common old wives tale that can be found all over the country, often with local variations (the specific area where the teens are making out is often the location teens typically go to make out, have sex, smoke weed, party, etc; sometimes it is an escaped prisoner, othertimes it is a murderer on a spree, sometimes it is a radio announcer who breaks the news, other times the teens manage to call the cops and it is the local cops who find the hook and announce it was probably hookman trying to break into their car to kill them, sometimes they get away to their home and hookman remains at large while othertimes they manage to run over hookman, etc). There are probab le thousands of different variations.*

    *This story was probably created by parents trying to scare teens away from doing the nasty or going to the out of the way, more isolated places where teens (in America) typically have done the nasty, with most of the details eventually added by more imaginative parents. In many cases, the young couple manages to get away, often to either their parents (at home), or to kindly police officers, but not without learning a lesson. In some cases, the Hookman is more just a sadistic murderer, while in other cases he is treated as a more mythical being (without eyes, or having a blank face, etc). It should be noted that in some cases the punchline isnt finding the hook, but rather the couple being brutally murdered in their car, but these fatal versions of the story are more rare.*

    *In these more brutal versions of the tale, often the man goes out to either investigate something they saw, or to take a piss (often blatently because he has been drinking beer), and he either comes back to find the girl brutally murdered, or is later found hanging from a tree above the car, sometimes with the soles of his boots scraping the cartop. It is very, very rare that both get killed (though occasionally, the girl is the one killed while the guy is left alive). Again, these variations seem to speak to its origins as a cautionary, moralistic tale in which the guy dies because he either left his date alone to search for a disturbance, or because he drank beer and needed to take a leak, etc.*

    *It should be noted that this urban legend is most likely based off of various lover’s lane murders that occurred prior to the 1950s when the legend was really solidified, though none of them can be really proven to be committed by an escaped prisoner or a man with a hook instead of a hand. Particularly, it is often accredited to the [Texarkana moonlight murders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texarkana_Moonlight_Murders). Particularly, the first attack of the Arkana murder spree is often credited as the inspiration of the story, as the victims of the first attack had previously seen a movie together, while the fictional victims of the myth are often presented as being on their way to the movies, or coming from a movie. Also, the first attack in Texarcana was not fatal, and the victims, like those in the myth, managed to both get away with some injuries. It also should be noted that one obscure suspect in the Texarkana killings was an escaped German prisoner of war. This is the closest parallel in that regard, however this was a very tertiary suspect and zero evidence connecting this unnamed individual with any of the attacks, and eventually a suspect (who most experts agree was likely the culpret, and who some have theorized was essentially offered a deal to be convicted of another crime with a life sentence after his wife recanted her confession) was identified, though was never charged for the crimes. A potential sixth victim of the Phantom (or, often, the phantom of Arkana) was also found on local railroad tracks with his arm sliced off, likely by a train, however again there is little that connects this incident with the other, and again no hook was involved.*

    [Wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hook) [Relatively tame version.](https://www.campfiremarshmallows.com/campfire-stories/the-hook-handed-killer/) [Snopes.](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-hook/)

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