Scary Stories Urban Legend 3
The Crying Baby Urban LegendA woman was working late at her office in the city when she was interrupted by a strange noise coming from outside her window. As it got louder, she recognized the unmistakable sound of a baby crying—an unusual noise at that time of night in that part of town, where there were few houses. She looked out of the window and couldn’t see anything, but the crying continued, and it sounded almost as if it were inside the building. She checked downstairs, where the noise was so loud that it could only have been coming from right outside the front door.
She put her hand on the door handle but despite all her instincts telling her to help the baby, something stopped her from opening it. Instead, she called the police and described the situation, asking them if they knew anything about a missing baby. She didn’t get the answer she expected, as the police officer told her not to open the door under any circumstances, to move away from the windows and to wait for help to arrive. The woman took this to mean that a missing child had indeed been reported and put the phone down. She moved away from the windows and waited. But the crying continued to get louder and she began to wonder why she should wait for the police—after all, they could take hours to arrive and the baby might need urgent medical attention; it must have been getting cold out there.
She decided that she would bring the poor child inside and then wait for the police, so she opened the door and stepped out onto the street. The crying stopped, but she could see no signs of a baby. The next sounds she heard were her own screams. When the police finally arrived, they found her lifeless body on the street, her throat slashed. If she had stayed on the phone long enough, the police officer would have had time to explain that there was a serial killer on the loose in town who was luring women outside at night with the recorded sound of a crying baby.
Don’t Play the
Lottery Urban LegendThe police department of a small town in Australia put out an online message warning residents about an unknown man who was suspected of killing one homeowner, seriously wounding another and trespassing on several other people’s property. He was dubbed the Lottery Killer because of his particular method of approaching his targets and murdering them. The first thing the victim would notice was a figure, with his face obscured, standing somewhere where he could clearly be seen, late at night. He would pick houses with glass doors or large windows overlooking the street, which he would stand in front of, silhouetted against the street lights and waiting to be noticed by the occupants—sometimes for several hours. Then he would knock 13 times at the door and wait for a response. If spoken to, he wouldn’t respond, but if the door was opened, he would attack viciously and indiscriminately with a long knife, murdering people in their own home. A bloody lottery ticket was left on the bodies.
The Gorbals Vampire Urban LegendThe children waited until it was dark to sneak out of their homes, picking up sticks and rocks to use as weapons on their way to the cemetery. They stalked the gravestones all night, waiting for a sight of what they had come to flush out: the Gorbals Vampire.
The Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, had been terrorised by stories of a 7-foot-tall vampire with metal teeth who preyed on children and had already eaten two local boys. The rumors were so powerful that gangs of hysterical kids took to the cemetery in the south of the city to catch the monster, despite efforts by the police to stop them. Frightened parents pestered the authorities, wanting to know if there really was a child-eating bloodsucking murderer roaming the place. To alleviate their fears, the authorities blamed the new comics from America, which were full of horror stories, for whipping up wild ideas in young minds and even went as far as banning sensationalist publications. However, the local children suspected that the adults were lying and were also terrified of the iron-fanged fiend. They were sure that he wasn’t some imagined monster from a comic book: the vampire was real and they were going to find him.
The sprawling Victorian cemetery looked like the perfect lair for an undead creature of the night: home to more than a quarter of a million dead bodies, its crumbling statues and sunken gravestones were lit at night by the flames of a nearby steelworks. The children scrambled over a seven-foot wall and dropped down amongst the graves, speaking in whispers. Then someone shouted, “There he is!” as a shadow flashed quickly across a tomb. The children gave frantic chase, tumbling over headstones in the dark and brandishing makeshift weapons. Soon they came upon a great stone mausoleum, its door ajar.
Peering into the murky depths of the tomb, they could make out a large stone coffin in the corner, with its heavy marble lid pushed to one side. Was this the beast’s hiding place? A couple of the braver kids, egged on by the others, edged inside the building and fearfully poked their sticks inside the dark sarcophagus. The rest of the gang held their breath, unsure whether they would stay and fight or run for their lives if the creature was awoken. But no attack came; the tomb was empty. Clearly, the vampire had escaped their grasp once again, but his hunters vowed to return the next night—and the next, if necessary—armed with wooden stakes.
The Bunny Man Urban LegendThere is a tunnel under a road that runs through remote woods in Oregon; an insane asylum had been built in the vicinity not long after the Civil War. As the area was colonised and became more popular, houses were built around the asylum, and near the turn of the century, the residents started to question its existence. When an escaped patient attacked a child, the authorities finally decided to close the institution.
They loaded the patients onto buses to transfer them to alternative places, but one of the vehicles crashed in the woods after a violent passenger broke free of his chains and attacked the driver. All were later apprehended, except for two: Billy Smith and Michael Wood. Police and dogs combed the forest, and picked up a trail marked with the mutilated bodies of rabbits, some half-eaten. The trail led down the old wagon track to the bridge, where they found one of the missing patients; Michael Wood was hanging inside the tunnel. He had been bludgeoned to death and his ears had been removed. Attached to his foot was a note that read: “You’ll never catch the bunny man!”
They attributed the murder to Billy Smith, supposedly a friend of Wood and convicted of several violent crimes against animals. The search continued but Billy, or Bunny Man as the cops had taken to calling him, was never found. The only traces he possibly left behind were the rabbits nailed to trees that hunters would occasionally find on overgrown paths, which they put down to a macabre joke. Although Billy Smith was eventually forgotten, the story of the Bunny Man was passed down through generations of locals, and the tunnel became the place to be for bored teenagers, who would dare themselves to stay there until midnight.
In 1965 a group of teens had congregated at the bridge on Halloween. Seven remained until midnight, but one of the girls decided to walk home just before then and wandered away, back down the track to the main road. A moment later she looked back and saw a bright flash of light coming from under the bridge, even though there were no cars or people on the road, and then she heard her friends screaming at the top of their lungs. Soon there was nothing but silence and darkness. Terrified, she ran home. The next day, all of the teens who had remained under the bridge at midnight were discovered hanged with their ears cut off. The police found a dismembered rabbit nailed to a tree nearby, along with a note that said, “Don’t forget the Bunny Man!”
They never managed to identify a suspect, never mind the murderer. Years later a teenager and his girlfriend had driven down there in search of some privacy—if you pulled off the main road and down an old track, nobody could see your car under the bridge. They both knew the legends—they had heard them since kindergarten—but nobody was scared of them anymore. It was a bright summer night, with a full moon, and the place was indeed full of rabbits, which stopped in the car’s headlights and stared as the pair drove under the bridge.
The pair soon lost track of time and at midnight they didn’t notice the rabbits streaming under the bridge, as if running from a predator; they only looked up when they saw a flash of light. The next person who saw them was a man searching for his dog that had run off to chase the local rabbits. The teens were swinging from the roof of the bridge, their ears missing. As the pet owner stared in shock at the grisly sight, the dog brought him a piece of paper in his mouth. It said, “You’ll never catch the Bunny Man!”
The Massacre Urban LegendIn 2007 an Ohio newspaper reported the rumors buzzing around a local university campus. A famous psychic had appeared on a phone-in radio show, claiming to have heard predictions at a s?ance. She warned that a massacre would take place at the college on Halloween and that, by the end of the month, seven students would die in a large H-shaped building near a railroad track on an Ohio campus. Students made frantic phone calls to university administrators, who in turn called in the police to investigate the claims but were reassured that there was no substance to the rumors.
Nonetheless, extra officers were deployed to help the regular campus cops. The student paper reported that some students were genuinely in fear of an attack, and many had taken refuge off campus until the threat was over. Soon it was the last weekend of the month and the college drinking society was due to hold a party. To show that they weren’t scared by the rumors, they decided that it would have a serial killer theme. Students who had not taken flight turned up wearing costumes from horror movies, and the venue was deliberately chosen because it was located in an H-shaped building. Halfway through the party there was a blackout and the drunken students joked that it would be the perfect time for the psychic’s attacker to strike. When the lights came back on, though, nobody was laughing: seven students lay dead, killed with an axe to the head in the bathroom.
Where’s My Liver Urban LegendBobby had been told by his mother to go to the shops and pick up a packet of fresh liver from the butcher’s. His grandfather was coming for dinner, and liver and onions was his favorite dish. Bobby hated liver, and he hated going in the butcher’s, but he did as he was told and set off to the shops. On the way there he met a friend who invited him to play a new computer game at his house, with some other mates.
Bobby wanted to explain that he was running an errand for his mother but he was too embarrassed, so he accepted; after all, it wouldn’t take long. When he next checked the time, he realized that it was dark and all the shops would probably be shut. He shot out of the house and ran down the road to the butcher’s, which was indeed closed. He was wondering what he would say to his mother, when he saw an old man rummaging around in the bins to the rear of the shop. He looked like a tramp, with greasy grey hair plastered over his dirty skin. Next to him was a supermarket trolley filled with filthy bags. The man saw him, and though Bobby wanted to run away, he was curious, so he asked the man what he was looking for.
“I’ve been getting myself some meat,” he told the boy, evidently pleased with himself. “They throw out perfectly good stuff here every day,” he added, pointing at the bins. Bobby saw that he had filled his trolley with lumps of meat wrapped in paper and on top was a fat calf’s liver. Before the old man could react, he grabbed it and ran off home as fast as he could. All the way down the high street Bobby could hear the trolley squeaking after him, but there was no way such an old man could keep up with a young boy.
The liver went down a treat, and Bobby’s grandfather said it was the best he’d eaten for as long as he could remember. The boy was allowed to stay up late that night as a reward and he played computer games downstairs until the small hours, pleased with his actions. As he was walking up the stairs to bed, he heard a noise outside the front door, so he looked out of the window but there was nothing there. Then came a squeaking sound, unmistakably the noise of an old supermarket trolley.
Still he could see nothing, but the noise grew louder and when the trolley came into view, Bobby ran upstairs in terror and hid under the blankets. He didn’t dare look out of the window to see if the old man was there and, eventually, he fell asleep. He was woken later by a knock on his bedroom door, followed by silence. A voice hissed, “Where’s my liver?” Then again, louder, “Where’s my liver, boy?” Bobby was frozen to the spot, and although he tried to scream, no noise came out. The door handle turned and the old man from the butcher’s stood in the doorway, smiling in the darkness. He was flashing a meat cleaver. “There’s my liver!”
The Bridge Urban LegendThere is a bridge in Wales where thrill-seeking teenagers go on Halloween. It’s a pretty little humpback stone bridge spanning a rocky river that flows down from the mountains, but it has a sinister past. Many years ago, there was a young woman—an only child—who lived in a manor house up the valley. She was smart and headstrong, and refused to marry the men that her father found for her, so he kept her locked away, waiting for her to agree to do his bidding.
One day a relative visited in a brand new motor car: a rare machine at the time in that part of the country. Her father had let his daughter out of her room for the occasion, so she took her one opportunity to escape. When her father wasn’t looking, the girl leapt into the driver’s seat and sped off down the valley. She flew down the hill towards the river, enjoying a blissful minute of freedom, before she realized that she didn’t know how to stop the vehicle and she ploughed straight off the bridge onto the rocks below.
Now, many years later, it’s still said that she haunts that bridge. If you flash your headlights as you’re driving over it, your car will stall. If you’re lucky, it will start again in few moments and you can be on your way but if you’re not, you will hear the girl knocking on the window. If you don’t open a door to let the girl in, you will die in a car accident within a week. The girl never managed to escape over the bridge and she won’t let you escape either…
