Urban Legends Around the World

The Wendigo is a man-eating creature or evil spirit that is native to the forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes region. Some descriptions of the Wendigo describe it being a monster with some characteristics of a human. Others describe it being a spirit that possessed a human and made them become monster-like. The Wendigo is typically associated with murder, greed, and other taboos.

This legend comes with its own medical term: Wendigo psychosis. This is described by psychiatrists as a syndrome that has symptoms like an intense craving for human flesh so much so that they develop a fear of becoming a cannibal. In Indigenous communities, a manifestation of Wendigo psychosis (or a sign of a Wendigo) is environmental destruction and greed.

The Wendigo is typically present in the North during winter time. One knows when a Wendigo is present due to the obvious signs: disturbing, gruesome murders, famines, and a large increase in crime.

Some believe that one becomes a Wendigo due to excessive greed while others believe it happens when one tastes human flesh. Wendigos are also said to be greedy due to the fact that they don’t stop eating people as they never get full. When they eat a person, they simply grow in proportion to the meal they just ate.

When a famine occurs and the presence of a Wendigo is apparent, there is a ritual called wiindigookaanzhimowin that is performed. This ritual includes the wearing of masks and dancing backwards around a drum.

The Wendigo is an ever-present creature in today’s pop culture society. It has appeared in countless movies and shows such as Supernatural, Grimm, and Hannibal. Its appeared in videos fames like Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons. It even appeared in Marvel Comics, its first appearance being in The Incredible Hulk.

Ever wonder what might be lurking in the shadows?

Ever think you see a person hiding in the shadows out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn, they’re gone?

Ever see someone or something dart quickly in the shadows?

Well, all your wondering can come down to one simple answer: shadow people.

Shadow people are exactly what they sound like: people who live in the shadows. They are typically male silhouette with no other real distinct characteristics. They can be tall or short, have hats on, wearing a cloak, solid black, or a little wispy. They are seen running into corners, closets, through walls, or behind buildings once the person turns their way.

Some people believe that the shadow people act as guardians for the person they are following. Almost as if they are their guardian angel. However, another large sum of the people who witness these creatures think that they are pure evil and want to do harm.

So for now no one actually knows what these creatures actually are nor do they know what they’re purpose is. And we probably won’t know until someone decides to strike up a conversation with one.

I shall leave with one final thought….beware the shadow people. Or not. I mean it’s really up to you.

Before you guess, no, these are not the love children of the popular 2000s group the Black Eyed Peas.

The black-eyed children are paranormal creatures that resemble children around the ages 6 to 16 who have pale skin and pitch black eyes and completely soulless. (So maybe the love children of the Black Eyed Peas?)

Let’s do some history shall we? Some people claim that these children have existed since the 1980s, however, most sources say that the legend actually originated in 1996 in posts written by a Texas reporter named Brian Bethel where he wrote about two alleged encounters with the black-eyed children. He said that he encountered two children in Abilene, Texas with pale skin and black eyes and that someone had a similar experience in Portland, Oregon. In 2012, Bethel retold his story on the TV show Monsters and Mysteries in America, he then wrote an article for the Abilene Reporter News where he described his experience again.

Also in 2012, a horror film titled Black Eyed Kids was produced and in 2013 an episode of MSN’s Weekly Strange featured different reports of the black-eyed children. Both of these things were thought to have helped spread this urban legend along.

This legend even crossed bodies of water and landed in the great land of the UK where in 2014 the Daily Star wrote three front-page stories about sightings of the black-eyed children in the haunted pub in Staffordshire. These alleged sightings were taken very seriously by ghost hunters who believed that the black-eyed children were extraterrestrials, vampires, or ghosts.

Now days, people still claim to see the black-eyed children when driving late at night down an empty road, or outside of their window late at night, or even lurking in the shadows of their room. In fact, many people have reported seeing the black-eyed children standing in the corner of their room during their episodes of sleep paralysis or even waking up in the middle of night because they sensed someone was watching them and in the shadows were these children.

Now, I’ll leave you with a lingering question…

Where are their parents?

**I feel like you can really see my sleep deprivation in this one**

*INCLUDES PICTURES DON’T READ IF YOU’RE SCARED OF CLOWNS*

This one goes out to Nicole.

So this one is less of an urban legend and more of a true tale.

Let’s go back to 2016 in South Carolina. It’s the middle of August and reports were being made that clowns were creeping in the woods outside of a town called Greenville. Some kids reported seeing clowns in the woods that were making weird noises and whispering. This was just the beginning.

The clown epidemic spread like wild fire across the country. A man in Kentucky was arrested after he was caught hiding in the woods while dressed up as a clown. A woman in Alabama called the police after seeing a clown in the Walmart parking lot. A teen in New York was chased out of the subway by a clown. Schools across the country were shutting down due to clown sightings. Videos of clowns lurking on the sides of roads during the night surfaced the Internet. Stories of all kinds of clown related experiences were popping up. Everyone wanted to know, “Why is this happening?”

Well, some believe that it started out as a publicity stunt for the up and coming remake of the famous Stephen King movie IT. These people think that the original clown sightings were all apart of a staged stunt to gain more publicity for the movie, but that things got out of hand when all of the sudden unplanned clown sightings were happening. However, no one knows the real reasoning behind these mysterious clowns.

These clowns, while not typically physically violent, were very psychologically violent. Many cases reported that the clowns tried to lure kids into the woods with candy or money or the promise of having fun. Other reports were of threats made by the clowns saying that they were going to harm a school full of children when they were let out for recess or after school. This is what caused many schools to close down for a day or so.

So while the clowns themselves weren’t all too dangerous, the people they were trying to scare were. In many videos posted on the Internet of clown encounters, the people would often get physical with the clowns. In one video a group of guys were in a car on the road, stopped, and facing a clown. It would appear that they encountered one on their drive. The clown was just staring at them and wouldn’t move no matter what they did. So the driver got out of his car and grabbed a bat from his trunk and started to chase the clown and hit him with the bat. (No one knows if these videos are fake or not) In another incident, a man in Pennsylvania stabbed a teen wearing a clown mask to death.

So here we are 3 years after the clown epidemic and we still aren’t entirely sure what caused this. However, this will stick with everyone who was around to witness it in its prime. And it will surely stick with those who were unfortunate enough to encounter one of these clowns.

Every little kid played this game at some point. You and a group of friends would go into a bathroom, lock the door, turn off the lights, and recite “Bloody Mary” three times while spinning in front of the mirror. Or if you were really brave, you went in alone. This ritual was done with the purpose of luring out the spirit of Bloody Mary. Legend has it that she would come out of the mirror, angry because you called upon her, and would do a number of things ranging from screaming to stealing your soul to drinking your blood to clawing your eyes out.

However, this wasn’t always how the game was played and it wasn’t always named “Bloody Mary”. It actually used to be a way for unmarried women to see the face of their future husband. The woman would walk backwards up a flight of stairs while holding a candle and a hand mirror. When they gazed in the mirror they would see the face of their future husband. But there was a chance that they could see a skull instead (the face of the Grim Reaper) which meant that the woman was going to die before she marries.

Most believe that Blood Mary originated from the English Queen Mary I, who was also called “Bloody Mary”. Mary was the only child of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Her father was mad due to the lack of male heir and voided his marriage to her mother and separated them, forbidding her from ever seeing her mother again. The king then married Anne Boleyn who gave him yet another daughter, Elizabeth. Boleyn was worried that Mary would interfere with Elizabeth’s succession and had Parliament declare her illegitimate. Boleyn was then beheaded by the king for treason. Mary eventually became queen in 1553. Mary later endured miscarriages and fake pregnancies, which she believed were a result of God punishing her for the Marian Persecutions. The Marian Persecutions took place in 1554 in which around 240 men and 60 women were sentenced as Protestants and burned at the stake. Thus earning her the name “Bloody Mary”.

Other people think that Bloody Mary is based on Elizabeth Bathory or Mary Worth. Mary Worth was a witch who was executed in the Salem trials. Elizabeth Bathory was nicknamed the “Queen of Blood” and was convicted for murdering hundreds of young girls so she could bathe in their blood.

The game is still played in households across the world. And Bloody Mary’s name continues to be chanted and feared. Movies have been made and television shows such as Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, and The X-Files have tackled their own rendition of this legend. Think back to when you played Mary’s game. What did you see?

Obviously I couldn’t make an urban legends blog and not talk about the legend himself, Slendy.

So how did Slender Man come about? Because I’m sure we all remember being in middle school and downloading the Slender Man game where you had to collect all the pages before Slender Man caught you. Or perhaps you remember seeing all those (obviously real) pictures of Slender Man lingering in the back of photos.

Well, Slender actually took his first breath of life in an online forum almost a decade ago. A user named Victor Surge posted a pair of images on the comedy website Something Awful and explained that they were found in the library of a small town.

In these images, Slendy is portrayed as a tall, dark, faceless figure dressed in a black suit. This became the Slender Man we all know and love. His legend grew and grew as more people put him into photos (sometimes with tentacles growing out of his back) and they created the story of how he abducted children and killed them.

People ate this idea up, they started to insert him into 16th century woodcuts and hieroglyphs. They wrote news articles about him. People even started to make videos in which they see Slendy. All of this to grow this legend.

However, this legend quickly escalated and became very dark. In May 2014, three 12-year-old girls went to the park the morning after a sleepover and only two came back. Two of the girls had planned on luring their friend out there and sacrificing her to Slender Man. She was barely hanging on to life when police found her and she told them that her best friend had done this to her. The police found the other two girls walking near a highway carrying a kitchen knife and a backpack full of water, clothes, granola bars, and photos of their families so they could remember them when they got to the mansion of Slender Man. Sadly, the girl passed away. The two other girls were charged and sentenced to 40 and 25 years in a psychiatric hospital.

In 2018 a trailer for the new film “Slender Man” was released in August. The movie has since been released.

So although we all like to joke around about the faceless, tall man in a suit that we so lovingly refer to as Slendy, we have to remember that some people actually became so submerged into this legend that they caused harm.

PS if you’ve never played the Slender Man game and really like to feel like your heart is gonna burst, 10/10 recommend. Tis super stressful.

This urban legend comes from the depth of Maryland. He is half-man half-goat. And he does exactly what you would expect him to do. He kills teens, eats dogs, screams like a shrill goat, and other things of the sort. Did I mention that he come wielding an axe? Terrifying I know.

Now, no one knows where exactly this urban legend came from.

One tale is that he was once a scientist who worked in the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. He was working on experiments using goats and one day the experiment backfired and he was mutated into a half-goat creature: The Goatman. (This one actually became so big that the USDA had to come forward and publicly deny creating this creature accidentally.)

Another tale is that he was a goat farmer who went crazy and killed tons of teenagers after he figured out that they killed his goats.

The more likely tale is that the Goatman legend was popularized in 1971 when a family came forward and blamed the brutal decapitation of their new puppy on the Goatman. The dog’s head was found 14 years later.

While the story of how he was created remains a mystery, the story of what he does is the same across the board. He jumps onto cars and chops tires so they can’t get away. He then drag them into the forest with him. Where, well, I’m sure you get the rest.

Now, don’t get this Goatman twisted with the Goatman in Texas. Two separate Goatmans. Who knows, maybe they are cousins.

The Goatman of Texas haunts the Old Alton Bridge, which is nicknamed Goatman’s Bridge for obvious reasons. This bridge connects Denton and Copper Canyon. The Goatman is said to roam the forest surrounding the bridge.

This Goatman arises from the tale of a black goat farmer who lived with his family on one side (the North side) of the bridge. A few years after he moved there, he became known as a dependable and honest businessman. So, North Texans started to call him the Goatman. The farmer put a sign on the bridge that read “This way to the Goatman’s.” Local Klansmen didn’t like this and turned to violence. They kidnapped the farmer and hung a noose on Old Alton Bridge where they hung him. When they looked down to check that he had died, he was gone. The Klansmen then panicked and went back to the farmer’s house where they killed his wife and children.

Locals now warn people of this tale. They warn that if you cross the bridge with no headlights, the Goatman will appear on the other side. People have reported seeing strange lights and ghostly figures as well as reports of being touched, grabbed, and having rocks thrown at them. Locals warn visitors not to mess with the Goatman.

Family members or not, neither of these Goatmans (is that the correct plural? who knows) are forces to be reckoned with. I would advise that if you are looking for a thrill, get it somewhere else. Or don’t, after all, it’s Shane and Ryan’s bridge now. (Peep Buzzfeed Unsolved)

Welcome to Sites At Penn State. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!