The reason urban legends work so well isn’t because they’re scary, but because they’ve happened to someone you know. It’s not a fictional story in a book anymore, but a shared tale of a community or locality, giving them more credence than any ghost story we can ever come up with.
Even if most of the popular urban legends we know of are likely to be entirely fictional, they’re worth mentioning because they don’t seem to go away. If someone accidentally mistook a bunch of rocks for a race of giant people living in the mountains, the myth would quickly vanish, as it wouldn’t be corroborated by anyone else. The only reason people would continue to believe it is if they kept finding clues that prove the theory correct. That plausibility – combined with our inherent fear of an unknown place – is what makes these urban legends from around the world so scary.
This is an encore of one of our previous lists, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. Read the full list!