Urban Legends: From The Vanishing Hitchhiker to Wendy's Wormburgers and Beyond...

Someone in another thread asked how it was possible to hide a razor blade in an apple.

It isn't.

Years ago, a few of us in the folk studies program at WKU did our own experiment. It wasn't a formal academic inquiry with core samples, precedential citations, and pictures with circles and arrows. We were just curious and wanted to know if there was any grain of truth to that old tale. The best we could do was slide it in at an angle so there was a flap of peeling over the incision. It was still obvious enough that an observant older child or grownup could have seen the apple was tampered with. (Stick taps to the art major who gave us the razor blade.)

Food fears and contamination legends are just a few of the OG fake news bits that have been with us for a long time.

 

Now I want to know about the hitchhiker and the wormburger.

 

Jim Morrison faked his own death. I was really fascinated by that theory mainly because I caught a snippet of a conversation about it right around the time that Eddie and the Cruisers was playing on HBO every third day.

 

The Bennington Triangle. You can hike it any time you like, but you can never leave.

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/bennington-triangle-vermont

 

The scream during the song "Love Rollercoaster" was an actual recording of a young woman getting murdered while the Ohio Players were recording live. I remember distinctly the scream, but can't find a youtube version that seems to amplify that scream. However, a google search confirms this urban legend and says it happens around the 1:24 mark.

 

You don't remember the earthworms rumor in Wendy's burgers?

 

Pop Rocks, Coke.

My fave? The “power outage” in Baltimore during Ripken’s streak.

 

Nope, @Regan MacNeil

 

alas poor Mikey, we knew him well

 

Look for the book by the same name by Jan Harold Brunvand. He's the mack daddy of American urban folklore on both academic and pop fronts.

The basic Aarne-Thompson Index version is this: A young man picks up a teen girl who is hitchhiking late at night. The weather is awful and she is cold and wet, so he offers her his jacket to wear while he drives her home. As he approaches the address she gave him to drop her off, he turns to say good night. The back seat is empty. He decides to go to the door to ask for his jacket and is greeted by an elderly couple. He explains he gave their daughter a ride and loaned her his jacket and he would like to get it back. The man ruefully chuckles and asks the boy if he picked her up a few miles back. When the boy affirms this, he explains that she got into a fight with her boyfriend, got out of the car, and started to walk home when she was hit by another drive on a blind curve. She has been dead for the last fifteen years. When the boy doesn't believe him, he mentions that the girl is buried in the family plot just up the road. He drives there and notices the strange silhouette of one of the toumbstones closer to the edge of the cemetery. When the boy gets out of his car with a flashlight to investigate, he sees his jacket draped over a headstone belonging to the girl who hitched a ride with him.

 

BTW, can I change the typo in my thread title?