31 Wild and Crazy Urban Legends About People’s Hometowns
Compared to the rest of these, an alligator colony sounds pretty good
![31 Wild and Crazy Urban Legends About People’s Hometowns](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/8/1/1/945811_320x180.jpg)
The thing about urban legends is that there’s no one true origin for most of them. The myth of an alligator colony living underneath New York City is intriguing, but there’s probably multiple cities across America that have similar folklore. That said, regardless of where these questionable urban legends begin, they have the enduring power to make people defy logic and embrace the fear that one day, an unsuspecting victim could fall into a manhole and be eaten or forced to live out the rest of their life with large sewer reptiles.
To that end, these brave Redditors shared some of the wild and crazy urban legends that have come out of their hometowns. You may even see a familiar tale about yours.
![SoapSudGaming . 5y Melonheads. The story is that a doctor ran experiments on a group of children, giving them enlarged heads. One day they killed the doctor and ran away to the surrounding forest to eat babies. This is Kirtland, Ohio; I think there are a few melonhead stories from other places. ... 369](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/6/944696.jpg)
![kingofthebins 5y We have an entire town-wide lore surrounding this massive, creepy ass forest called Rugar Woods on the edge of town. It's the most obviously haunted place on earth. Full of abandoned factories and warehouses and weirdly placed infrastructure. One of the most peculiar things about it is that there are random items everywhere; TVs, bicycles, clothes- even cars and tractors, just laying about in the forest. It honestly feels like loot in a video game. It's said that if you want something, you will find it in Rugar Woods- provided that you are willing to look for it.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/2/944692.jpg)
![RoscoeCostco 5y The Jersey devil was born there. The 13th child of a backwoods witch who cursed him as he was coming out of her womb because she was tired of having kids. Не emerged, leathery and winged, and flapped out the window to terrorize the pine forests he was born in. Honestly though, as monsters go, the jersey devil never really does anything - doesn't take babies from the cradle, or eat kids who dont eat their greens. As far as I know he just startles livestock occasionally and screeches sometimes, like an owl. Не is probably just an owl. There](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/5/944695.jpg)
![ProLipton 5y There's a house along a busier street of town near the school. It is a considerably nicer home than the other houses along the street. However the house seems to go up for sale every few months. The legend was that the house is haunted by the first owners, who were killed by their butler and when the kids came home from school, they found the butler hanging from the ceiling of the kitchen. I still drive past this house from time to time and it is up for sale 30% of the time. ... 700](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/3/944693.jpg)
![Bighomiegeoff . 5 5y That there is a serial killer who pushes drunk men in the canals. The police say the canals are just filled with drunks who fell in. Who knows? ... 1.2k](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/4/944694.jpg)
![brotherjonathan . . 5y A cyclone come throug town in 1899 and destroyed a home where a baby was taken with his crib and gently set down in a neighboring field, still in his crib, unscathed. ... 1.9k](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/8/944688.jpg)
![Catalyst34 . ! 5y Alligator colonies thriving in the sewer system - NYC ... 18](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/7/944687.jpg)
![dolphinankletattoo . 5y Munger Road. There is a train track in the woods that is apparently haunted. A school bus was trying to pass and got stuck and a train hit them. They legend is if you put your car on the train tracks in neutral the ghost of the kids will push you off. (The train track is on a hill so you'll obviously roll back or forward.) ... 36](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/1/944691.jpg)
![kazzypoo . 5y Really old stone bridge by a castle that has these claw marks. Legend has it a woman was thrown over and now she lies at the bottom of the river and every so often you can here her scream. Apparently a man fell over while the tide was out and as he lay injured the woman stood over him telling him to get up. Не said she was protecting him from the in coming tide. ... 38](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/9/0/944690.jpg)
![not_another_feminazi . ! 5y According to the legend, there was a haunted house in my neighborhood. So, the happy family lives in a beautiful house, daughter is a ballerina, and a good one, parents are proud, everything is perfect, until the girl dies (our parents said it was cancer) the mom kills herself ( the legend says she tied a rope to her neck and jumped from the girl's room window, and the dad goes crazy. After a few years he's forcefully removed from the house, and every so often is seen roaming around the front, but never goes in. Me and my friends](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/9/944689.jpg)
![woodk2016 . 5y A young couple gets into an argument while driving down a particularly hilly rural road at night, passenger throws her engagement (or maybe class) ring out the window. They cool down decide to go back and look for the ring in the dark, at least one got hit by a car and died. That stretch of road is now haunted (or so the legend goes) by a ghost looking for her ring ... 69](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/6/944686.jpg)
![franky_63 5y The corn goblin. So pretty much the corn goblin lives in the corn fields and eats children and if he is happy you get a good harvest. Update now that I'm not in school and can finish Не is said to stand around 7 to 8 feet tall but hunches over while walking in the corn fields so he won't be seen. Also it is said that farmers used to sacrifice their children for a good harvest. This being the reason that farmers had so many children. Не is also said to have glowing red eyes and sounds](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/4/944684.jpg)
![illdefinedleap 5y I grew up in a town, Lewis Run which is in the middle of a Pennsylvania forest and the story of how my tiny little town got named was literally passed down for decades from older kids to younger kids to scare them! As the ledge does goes: Lewis was a kid a long time ago, one day he was waiting for the bus and a bear waltzed out of the woods. Once young Lewis saw the bear, he started frantically running around his bus stop when the bus came down the hill. The bus never stopped, and](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/5/944685.jpg)
![ColdBeef . . 5y That some woman named Mary who was murdered haunts a back road. I had my first beer out there looking for her with my friends. ... 311](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/3/944683.jpg)
![dwharden22 . 5y The Loveland Frogmen (Loveland, Ohio, near Cincinnati). 3-4ft tall frog people that live in the Ohio River. The first spotting involved a man seeing a grouping of them and one brandished a wand. Several years later, a police officer described an singular being of the exact same description. ... 318](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/2/944682.jpg)
![Desdemona-in-a-Hat 5y The Bunny Man. I'm from Chattanooga. The Tennessee River cuts through the city and establishes a barrier between Downtown and Moccasin Bend, a residential mental health facility, or perhaps more apt for the story, an insane asylum. The legend involves an escaped patient, The Bunny Man, so called because he wears a bunny suit (or perhaps because he feeds on wild rabbits, stories differ). In some versions of the tale he is completely benign, basically living as a rabbit in the wood surrounding the asylum. Other versions are more sinister, with The Bunny Man catching and killing children](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/1/944681.jpg)
![yeastygeese. & 8y I grew up in a big skiing town on the east coast of the US, and there used to be an official Playboy Clubhouse very near the slopes. For whatever reason, Hugh and the bunnies stopped using it, and the rumor I always heard is that it's haunted now. Haunted by what, exactly, I have no idea, since nobody died there. We also have a few haunted lake rumors. I think mostly people were just bored and wanted something to talk about. ... 89](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/9/944679.jpg)
![StephenHawkings_Legs . 8y Some In Wichita, there is a bridge, Theorosa's bridge. There are a few versions of the story, but most of them tell that there once was a woman who had an illegitimate baby, and she threw the baby off the bridge into the water to be rid of it. Full of grief and regret, she then jumps in after the baby and drowns herself. Supposedly, if you go to the bridge and yell loudly that your are Theorosa's child or that you have her child, she will appear and drown you in the river.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/7/944677.jpg)
![alwaysapirate . . 8y There is a legend that The Grey Man will appear on the beach before a hurricane and that whoever he appears to will have their home spared. Pawleys Island, SC. ... 435](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/8/0/944680.jpg)
![shanekorn 5y There's a very old house at the top of the Wicklow mountains called The Hell Fire Club. Legend has it that in the 1800s? a group of people were playing poker around the table and one of them dropped a card. Apparently he saw that one of the players had hooves. When I was a kid I remember being told there was a gateway to hell outside of the house. The scenery is beautiful up there on a clear day. ... 26](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/8/944678.jpg)
![SwegTestica7 . 8y In my hometown there is a legend that one of our highschools is haunted by a girl who commited suicide in the school.There was reports of green like ooze dripping from the cieling and the hallway supposedly covered in fog everyday. The hallway has been closed on the fourth floor that has been closed off for decades. Some hear a girl sobbing near the hallway, some see her waving at them from the balcony, even some see a girl jump off of the balcony and see her vanish before she hits the ground.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/5/944675.jpg)
![troycheek 8y We've got a basic woman in white that haunts a local graveyard. When you drive by at night, you don't look at the graveyard, because if you see her, she sees you, follows you home, and kills you in your sleep. ... 39](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/6/944676.jpg)
![whirlpearl. 6y Skunk Ape. Imagine a kind of Bigfoot dude that looks more like a gorilla and lives in the Everglades of Florida and smells like shit. Yep. ... 933](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/2/944672.jpg)
![wwhart 6y The library in my hometown is attached to a 200+ year old mansion that was said to be haunted. Specifically, the attic, which is huge and shadowy and tends to collect dead pigeons. The local paper even did a story about the supposed haunting, with photo 'proof'. The library did lock-in nights in the summer and they'd tell scary stories in the attic, which wasn't so bad because you were with a group...later on I ended up working at the library and would have to go up in the attic, alone, at night to make sure no one](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/4/944674.jpg)
![kirokatashi . 6y Supposedly in the 1800s, a young boy was separated from his family's caravan as they tried to escape the flooding creek. The boy stayed in the woods along the creek and became a hermit who would scare off any travelers who entered his domain. Eventually he got himself trampled by horses, and now the ghost of the Hairy Man haunts the area that Hairy Man Road now runs through. ... 800](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/3/944673.jpg)
![TFN928 5y Supposedly there are vaults hidden all around where I live. My region was pretty big during prohibition, since Canada's just across the river, allowing bootleggers to import from there. Supposedly they'd make short tunnels off the sides of basements or even sewers to hide small stashes of alcohol. Rumor is that there's some valuable stuff in some, since they ran more than just alcohol. It's not too far-fetched, but obviously I can't just go for a romp in the sewers or people's basements. Still, it's a neat little lost treasure story. ... 119](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/1/944671.jpg)
![Mycelium83 Зу The aboriginal people of Australia talk about the hairy men which is some kind of apelike beast. Another name is the yowie. Basically these things were bloodsucking creatures that would eat you and the aboriginal people were pretty afraid of them. Apparently they would stalk you and follow you through the bush and they move fast. The weird thing is though there are lots of different tribes in Australia with different languages but all of the tribes name for these creatures translates to hairy men. Also drop bears gotta watch out for drop bears when you're in the](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/7/0/944670.jpg)
![KnockMeYourLobes . 3y There is a local lake that when I was growing up, I heard this story that a woman was drowned there by her fiancee'. On certain nights she would come up out of the water and if you happened to be parked near the lake, she would put her hand on your windshield. If she pulled her hand away and it left a handprint, it meant you were going to die too. ... 2.2k](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/6/8/944668.jpg)
![HappyDrunkSadSober . 3y The one in my country that states There was once a foreigner that sang in a karaoke My way by Frank Sinatra in the middle of the night but was shot in the head before he could finish it since he stole the mic from a killer that reserved the song and some claim that it happened multiple times in a span of a decade in multiple locations. From that day on patrons of any bar will refrain from choosing My way in a karaoke in the middle of the night in fear that their lives will end](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/6/6/944666.jpg)
![5minsketcher Зу The whistler. Basically a son killed his father and the grandfather found out, whipped the boys back to a raw state and made him carry his dad's bones in a sack for all eternity. Scary thing is that when he is around you will hear a whistle. Thing is, the louder the whistle the farther away he is, the closer he is the whistle will sound more faint. It's said he does this to play with you and confuse you before mutilating you and adding your bones to his sack. Said to have killed houndreds of people. ...](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/6/7/944667.jpg)
![CasualSleeper Зу In Pennsylvania there's the 7 gates of hell near Hellam Township. There was an insane asylum built in the forest away from the general population to keep all the patients away from people. Its believed that the asylum burnt down and many patients died during the fire or escaped into the surrounding forest. the name comes from the fact that a gate was built to keep the escaped patients from leaving the area. But when night falls you can follow the path past the first gate and will eventually pass through an additional 6 gates and after passing](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/6/6/9/944669.jpg)