After a bit of googling on a seperate matter, I have just spent time delving into the old story about water parks that closed down due to razor blades being stuck in the grooves. I remember hearing it originally about Grundy’s water slides in Surfers Paradise in the mid 80’s and that was the reason the slides got closed down. Then saw a thing about the real reason they shut was some kid going down the slides gained too much speed and went flying over the side at one of the bends. Then saw bunch of stories from UK, NZ and US all having the same stories all from around the smae time 80’s-90’s.
This got me thinking, what’s your favorite urban legend?
If you allow for Urban legends actually being true, I came to be amazed at how even in the days before the internet the fear of Purple Aki reached my school playground in West Wales in the 80s.
You raise an interesting point about an urban legend and it’s ability to spread far and wide before the rise of the internet, but since then there doesn’t seem to be as many new urban myths coming about.
Is it because, although it may now be potentially much easier to disseminate certain myths, it is also easier to debunk them through a bit of careful research, thus stopping them gaining traction, whereas in pre-internet days things travelled more by word of mouth without being properly checked?
they are so cliche eighties youd think im making them up, but;
we had a screwdriver murderer at a local park if you stayed out to late and had to cut through it to get home
we also had someone commit suicide on the train tracks (probably true) and body parts being found in peoples front yards…someone was supposed to have seen an eyeball in a front yard…
horrible subjects, but yeah, the ability for this stuff to spread was a cool factor about being born into an era less conectable…
the rumours dont go, just the make up of them…seems more and more like a fued between pop stars on the internet have filled that void…
As a kid in infant and junior school someone would start the rumour that ‘skinheads’ were coming from Paddington (a school in Liverpool) to ‘get us’ when school finished. These skinheads had a penchant for playing noughts and crosses on your legs with razor-blades.
Many was the time I sat through lessons shitting myself at the prospect. Never happened of course.
we had one where a whole school was coming over for a fight and half the school stuck around afterhours waiting for it…LOL…never happened obviously…but yeah…
In South Africa, if you ever wondered why some black people hoist their beds off the ground with bricks, it’s because of the the only way to keep the tokoloshe away at night.
A tokoloshe is an evil creature that causes harm, like biting off your toes, etc, while your sleep. And this this is a black cultural thing as it originated from the Bantu and Zulu tribes. The origin is quite interesting as it’s said to come from carbon monoxide poisoning from fires, so the higher you were off the ground the safer you were.
In the late 90’s, every single lake seemed to have a double-decker bus at the bottom.
Not an urban legend, but my grandma used to discourage me from swimming in a lake by the old Morfa Stadium, claiming the current would drag me under. What a prick I felt when I twigged a couple years ago.
Another one I remembered last night was of another school getting closed down after police find a huge weed plantation and burn the crop, but then fear the smoke will get all the kids stoned.
Yet I have never actually met a student from any of the mentioned schools that were there during the closure, or knew of anyone that happened too.
