VIDEO: Creepy Urban Legends from Around the World

This video presents a creepy selection of modern day ghost stories and horrific tales from all over the world that have much more than a grain of truth at heart.

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And to enrich you knowledge, here is some background information on urban legends, provided by Wikipedia.

Despite its name, an urban legend does not necessarily originate in an urban area. Rather, the term is used to differentiate modern legend from traditional folklore of pre-industrial times. For this reason, sociologists and folklorists prefer the term “contemporary legend”.

Because people frequently allege that such tales happened to a “friend of a friend”, that phrase has become a commonly used term when recounting this type of story.

Urban legends are spread by any media, including newspapers, e-mail and social media. In America in 1938 a radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds supposedly caused mass panic, though the program had a relatively small audience. In 2005, a widespread legend claimed that a large percentage of people have a biological father who is not their assumed father.

Some urban legends have passed through the years with only minor changes to suit regional variations. More recent legends tend to reflect modern circumstances, like the story of people ambushed and anesthetized, who awaken minus one kidney, which was supposedly surgically removed for transplantation.

The term “urban legend,” as used by folklorists, has appeared in print since at least 1968. Jan Harold Brunvand, professor of English at the University of Utah, introduced the term to the general public in a series of popular books published beginning in 1981.

Brunvand used his collection of legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings (1981) to make two points: first, that legends and folklore do not occur exclusively in so-called primitive or traditional societies, and second, that one could learn much about urban and modern culture by studying such tales.

Many urban legends are framed as complete stories with plot and characters. The compelling appeal of a typical urban legend is its elements of mystery, horror, fear or humor. Often they serve as cautionary tales.Some urban legends are morality tales that depict someone, usually a child, acting in a disagreeable manner, only to wind up in trouble, hurt, or dead.

The Internet makes it easier to both spread urban legends and debunk them. Discussing, tracking, and analyzing urban legends is the topic of the Usenet newsgroup, alt.folklore.urban and several web sites, most notably snopes.com.

The United States Department of Energy had a service, now discontinued, called Hoaxbusters, that dealt with computer-distributed hoaxes and legends.

Television shows such as Urban Legends, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, and later Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed, feature re-enactments of urban legends detailing the accounts of the tales and (typically) later in the show, these programs reveal any factual basis they may have.

Since 2003, the Discovery Channel TV show MythBusters has tried to prove or disprove urban legends by attempting to reproduce them using the scientific method.