The wildest urban legends that just so happen to be true


Who doesn’t love a good story? We tell them all the time, even if it’s just about what happened at work that day. Of course, there are far more exciting stories to share than how you spent your last eight hours at the office. We’re referring to the urban legends which send chills down your spine and get your creative juices flowing. Typically, these tales are just fictional anecdotes intended to entertain, but it turns out some of them might actually be rooted in fact.

Colonel Buck’s gravestone stain

When Colonel Jonathan Buck was alive, he was a justice of the peace responsible for founding the town of Bucksport. The colonel reportedly took his job very seriously, to the point that he even sentenced a woman to be burned for being a ‘witch.’ That’s not too surprising given that Bucksport was in Massachusetts, the same state where many women were put on trial for supposedly being witches in the 1600s.

While she was being burned alive, one of the ‘witch’s’ legs apparently emerged from the flames, leading her to put a curse on Buck’s grave. Strangely enough, a stain in the shape of a leg can be seen on the man’s tombstone, and no attempt to get rid of it has ever been successful.

Colonel Buck’s gravestone

The woman in black

If you haven’t seen the horror film The Woman in Black, you’re probably still aware of it. Fortunately, nothing like that exists in real life, although there is technically a woman in black walking around. Well, there was anyway. Several years ago in 2014, drivers spotted the unsettling sight of a figure draped in black along the highways of the South. People had no idea who she was or what she was doing, but her presence left them unnerved.

Thankfully, there wasn’t anything creepy going on. The woman was apparently wearing black because she was in mourning for her recently departed husband. The reason she was walking along the highway was to do with a pilgrimage she was on associated with her faith.

Cropsey the bogeyman

Most of us were told scary stories about the bogeyman when we were children, but as we grew up, we were assured that the menacing figure wasn’t actually real. Well, not in the form we know him as anyway. It seems that in the 1980s, Staten Island had its own manifestation of the Bogeyman in the figure of Cropsey. Believed to take children from their beds at night armed with an ax, he gave many kids on the island a sleepless night.

Stories of Cropsey likely stemmed from the real-life kidnappings by Andre Rand, a janitor who worked at one of the local schools. It was discovered that he was responsible for taking at least two children, although it’s speculated he was behind several more kidnappings in the area. If you don’t already, it might be a good idea to start locking your doors at night.

Cropsey, a documentary

We may have incredibly creative imaginations, but our ideas for stories have to come from somewhere. Next time you think up an urban legend, you might want to see if there’s any truth to it.

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