There wasn't much room left for obscure, local urban legends.
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Available on: Amazon Prime Where do urban legends come from?
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And those efforts are aided by urban legends about fraud.
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Urban legends have enchanted people around the world for centuries.
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Those urban legends were the final nail for homemade confections.
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Reginella funds his projects through his gift shop NYC Urban Legends.
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They felt like urban legends happening to you in real time.
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These short digestible urban legends still kinda exist under the radar.
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Urban legends about undetectable poisons and hidden razor blades were everywhere.
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Often, like urban legends, they sounded too good to be true.
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Every culture has its own urban legends, myths, or spooky stories.
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Science is a vital check on these sorts of urban legends.
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Good scary stories aren't about facts; they're about myths and urban legends.
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These facts and figures slay a lot of left-wing urban legends.
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Then he turned his attention to urban legends and myths of all kinds.
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That's the kind of thing that happens with urban legends all the time.
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"Urban legends are projections of society's anxieties, hopes, fears, and worries," says Blank.
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Unlike his previous documentaries, which dealt with urban legends, this story is real.
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They have the nightmarish, inevitable illogical logic of folk tales or urban legends.
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"New York City's been riddled with myths, hoaxes and urban legends," he said.
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As the urban legends go, Disney movies are riddled with subliminal reference to sex.
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Just as every state has its own urban legends, many have controversial conspiracy theories.
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There are plenty of urban legends and fake state laws circulating around the internet.dumblaws.
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Like so many urban legends, this one begins on a dark and stormy night.
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In many ways, it's just another permutation of campfire ghost stories or urban legends.
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However, like most popular urban legends, it doesn't look like Momo will be going away.
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Urban legends are moral tales that tell a story about how certain groups should behave.
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That will include new stunts inspired by urban legends, popular scary movies and viral videos.
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You start to get these folk stories or urban legends about how these things work.
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Keep scrolling to see 15 urban legends from around the world that just won't die.
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Musical Urban Legends is a series of comics based on music world whispers and hearsay.
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These kinds of urban legends become a way for the kids to process their emotions.
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The Accuracy of Introductory Psychology Textbooks in Covering Controversial Topics and Urban Legends About Psychology.
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Ben Radford is a folklore and urban legends researcher with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
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It's a six-episode animated series that will focus on different urban legends and horror stories.
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When mentioned in conversation, the establishment's name is enough to evoke colors, sounds, and urban legends.
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Mr. Miscione used the alligator legend as a point of departure to recount other urban legends.
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The dangers of looking in the mirror while on psychedelics is the stuff of urban legends.
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Whether it's Gilgamesh or urban legends, the art of storytelling has been around for thousands of years.
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We've rounded up the scariest urban legends from around the world, from Hawaii to Scandinavia to Egypt.
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Are there any misconceptions or urban legends that you disproved or found valid while writing the book?
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A co-worker told me there are less offensive variations available, but they seem like urban legends.
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Today, urban legends can spread faster and farther than ever before, especially in a young, tech-literate population.
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That makes it possible for kids to play a much bigger role in shaping and creating urban legends.
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All the social change in the 1970s fed the creation of urban legends, argues sociologist Jefferey S. Victor.
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However, since the assassination was carried out in private and the remains' location kept secret, urban legends spewed.
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We'll unearth some urban legends and explore bizarre moments in history that have happened at your favorite chains.
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Eight months into his presidency, Mr. Trump's self-touted negotiating skills are more urban legends than anything else.
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Urban legends, including the tales of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, have been thrilling people for decades.
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Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Yeti are among the most popular urban legends, according to the findings.
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The good news for you is that coffee is NOT dehydrating, as urban legends might have you believe.
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Schwartz's series, which began publishing in 1981, contained stories largely rooted in folk tales and urban legends — effectively timeless.
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Urban legends murmur about mothers who heave cars off their infants; the power of a parent cannot be underestimated.
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While both are very entertaining, I just don't know if I believe that they're real and not simply urban legends.
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There's no record of any Boy Scout deaths on Boy Scout Lane, but that hasn't stopped urban legends from spreading.
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But recently I've been captivated by the very, very few urban legends that have some veracity behind the myth-making.
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Urban legends would have us believe that the first restaurant was opened post-Revolution by the former chef of an aristocrat.
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On one of the Internet's earliest discussion boards, Mikkelson started out writing about the biggest urban legends surrounding all things Disney.
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Snopes (22018)The internet has made it possible for urban legends, bullshit rumors, and obvious hoaxes to go viral almost instantly.
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The stories of Momo and Slender Man are online updates of other urban legends: collective fictions where many different permutations coexist.
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Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro is bringing these urban legends to life with a scripted adaptation of Schwartz's stories.
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Variety adds that the stories often took inspiration from classic fairy tales or urban legends, but always added a modern twist.
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If you believe urban legends, the Cape Pillar Sea Cliffs can also be called the "Scariest Cliffs in the Known Universe".
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Sharing selfies and urban legends, the four friends are an unselfconscious sorority, flirting with the camera and making out with abandon.
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I loved urban legends as a kid because that was the only time in my life I believed they were real.
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It's surrounded by a bevy of terrifying urban legends like the infamously depraved Red Rooms, where users can live-stream murder.
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The Twilight Zone is more about urban legends, traditional social morals, and speculative horror, along with extra dimensions and seriously creepy characters.
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In the past, creator Ryan Murphy has used real-life events and urban legends to inspire various seasons of American Horror Story.
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However, once the SCP Foundation came about, creepypastas and internet urban legends found a permanent home where they would be memorialized forever.
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Another Facebook-selected group, Snopes, is more focused on debunking urban legends and bogus email forwards — sometimes, but not always, about politics.
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The show's basic premise is that it adapts modern urban legends — specifically from creepypasta, a horror genre that's unique to the internet.
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That sentiment has led to "Euromyths," a genre of urban legends about European regulations that gained traction during the British referendum campaign.
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These neighborhood rebels became urban legends in their own time, spawning insurgent social, political and cultural revolutions that continue to this day.
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"A lot of people will be disappointed to discover that these urban legends are not true," said Rome's chief Rabbi Ricardo Di Segni.
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They offer the kind of appeal that causes fake news to spread on Facebook or urban legends to travel by word of mouth.
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One of the reasons we love historic hotels is the urban legends they've inspired — and many of them come with a spooky twist.
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Armed with your own mysterious spectral abilities, you will face down the occult, unravel conspiracy theories and experience urban legends like never before.
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Urban legends are a sub-genre of folklore that sprang up as cities became increasingly dense around the time of the Industrial Revolution.
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Since his death, more about his adult life has become known, though often through anecdotes so quirky that they sound like urban legends.
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A recent article in Snopes claims that many—if not all—of these claims are false and just urban legends designed to perturb consumers.
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But there is a reason so many horror films are set in the suburbs and why urban legends like the Watcher House endure there.
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I told them my boys and I had the idea to hunt urban legends, myths, and monsters [and we decided] to make a show.
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This curry tells of adaptation to the terrain and available ingredients—and it's not short on mystery, sparking its fair share of urban legends.
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Of course for each of the more playful there's a darker reflection, and we saw a return of the more urban legends as well.
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Cultural Studies Everyone has heard grim tales of lives blighted by online gaming, stories that sound like urban legends even when they actually happened.
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Until then, Snopes's fate, like so many of the urban legends the website has set out to debunk over the years, remains in dispute.
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And he's the creative director of Urban Legends, an imprint at Universal Music Group that creates anniversary editions of hip-hop and soul music.
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The CW show Roswell, which ran from 222 to 251, brought Roswell's extraterrestrial urban legends into people's living rooms — no pilgrimage to New Mexico required.
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They, along with co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, used science and engineering to test farfetched myths and urban legends — and sometimes bust them.
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Since Schwartz's stories were always extremely short and were cribbed from already existing urban legends, I imagine the script's story is original to the film.
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One of the most dangerous urban legends that plagues credit card users is the idea that it's beneficial to carry a balance month-to-month.
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Urban legends about Honor of Kings abound: a recent slate of headlines suggested a player went blind because she couldn't stop looking at her phone.
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Those stories were largely based on urban legends that were repeated every October, and some widely reported hoaxes perpetrated by both kids and their parents.
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"I really hope this report helps put a little bit of evidence on a lot of the urban legends that are around there," Paoli said.
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For 20 years, the site was dedicated to urban legends, like the purported existence of alligators in New York City sewers, and other benign misinformation.
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The jokes both operate on the shock of sex acts that have become urban legends; they both describe the same thing, but with different names.
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Glass' signature orchestral sound introduces us to the "safe and normal" world of academia as a graduate student protagonist works on a thesis about urban legends.
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Here's its mission statement:This is a Scary Website that is made for the following: Lost Episodes Phobias, Urban Legends Or Serial Killers,BUT NO GRAPHIC PICTURES!
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Urban legends about famous folks tend to follow a few different scripts: deaths, or so-and-so died, and their body was replaced with a double.
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Berry is the subject of multiple urban legends, several of which might actually be true and which often seem to involve cheapness, violence and sexual defecation.
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He offers a history of the holiday, while also debunking urban legends like that of candy tampering, of which he only found two known lethal cases.
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The Casquette Girls series is a local favorite loved by both teens and adults alike, featuring vampires, witches, magic, and ghosts from different local urban legends.
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The list of ideas also included some urban legends — like the one about the brain only using 10 percent of its potential at any given time.
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The stories about the way he once cut budgets at Marvel have become urban legends (see: the allegation that Marvel headquarters only has one bathroom per gender).
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" It also found that "the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.
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We've explored everything from burger deliveries in Cairo to the urban legends of KFC and clogged your feed (and possibly your arteries) with all things fast food.
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There are urban legends you hear when you get into the industry so you'll know which companies look at crunch as a normalcy, and we avoid those.
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The victim survived a brutal stabbing — and Slender Man became part of the disturbing trend of online memes inspiring serious real-world action, particularly internet urban legends.
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If you love urban legends and creepy internet creatures, look no further than The SCP Foundation, a website dedicated to collecting information on supernatural creatures, events, and objects.
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Like its namesake podcast, Lore is an anthology show that tells one-off stories, usually with a horror bent, exploring the origins of popular urban legends and myths.
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The game has been so successful that it has led to a number of urban legends, including the story of a woman going blind from playing too much.
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In both Cropsey and Killer Legends, Zeman successfully places urban legends in the context of larger American anxieties, painting a picture of horror emerging from an evolving nation.
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It's here, in a long, wood-paneled room, that David Mikkelson works to keep the Internet safe from urban legends, falsehoods and lies with his myth-busting website, Snopes.com.
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It's never happened in the 224-year history of the Oscars (much less in the biggest category), and it seemingly disproved one of the longest-running Oscar urban legends.
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NIN's music video for "LESS THAN" — released Thursday — not only samples the recent VR game Polybius, but also delves into the reigning champion of bizarre video game urban legends.
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By piggybacking on the latest communication innovations of the era, the ability of urban legends to propagate bullshit has grown immensely over time, keeping the fine folks at Snopes.
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We present a case study on the way that urban legends are born and spread, and delve into how the increasing belief in nonhuman intelligence inspires our real world.
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Six fact-checking organizations (Snopes, Politifact, Factcheck, Truth or Fiction, Hoax-Slayer, and Urban Legends) were chosen to form the basis of whether a story was true, false, or mixed.
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During the 1980s, he says, urban legends about razor blades in candy bars and other hazards led to wide-scale concerns about the safety of trick-or-treating on Halloween.
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Once you've dug into Pokémon tv shows, video games, and urban legends, you'll be ready for Bulbapedia, the fan-run wiki-style repository of character stats, niche trivia, and backstory.
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The researchers, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that those patterns applied to every subject they studied, not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science and technology.
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Family Affair is a physical space that serves as an extension, in some ways, of Wax Poetics, whose editor-in-chief, Andre Torres, invited Anzures to work with Urban Legends.
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In his book "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand argues that while urban legends may be grounded in actual incidents, they often come to stand in for real-world fears.
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Tonight, the Science Channel is resurrecting its reality show where two hosts test out a bunch of urban legends, usually with a hefty dose of science, engineering, and explosions thrown in.
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The typical backlash to these policies involves myriad white urban legends and a number of lawsuits based on the idea that unqualified "minorities" are awarded positions over more qualified white people.
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Some users, even those who have no intention of spreading wrong information, are forwarding along viral rumors and urban legends in an effort to push vital information that is frequently untrue.
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The specific register of panic that Momo generated also drew comparison with the vast wealth of pre-internet urban legends, like saying "Bloody Mary" three times into the mirror at sleepovers.
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Stupidly, that did not end the controversy: Subsequent racist urban legends popped up about him sometimes wearing his pins upside-down as a Carol Burnett ear-pull to his Muslim Brotherhood friends.
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Shows like Black Mirror work around the issue by utilizing the anthology format, and each season of Channel Zero tells a different narrative riffing on the internet urban legends known as creepypasta.
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Based on a Clive Barker short story, this disquieting riff on urban legends has become a model for countless horror movies about supernatural monsters who emerge when their names are repeatedly called.
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With that in mind, we've rounded up 29 different true crime cases, urban legends, and creepy internet stories that we think the American Horror Story team should consider for its next season.
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Previously the managing editor at Snopes, Binkowski has made a career of tracking online conspiracy theories, urban legends, and propaganda, a realm she said has become "nastier, more fearful" over the years.
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And while urban legends of the Twinkie's Highlander-esque qualities abound, one chemistry teacher at George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, Maine had the foresight to test this hypothesis back in 1976.
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Previous seasons have leaned on shared cultural knowledge like gory urban legends or well-known historical events, and a few have taken place in the present day, but none have ever done both.
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"There are a lot of urban legends about spider bites," Seger said, adding that she has seen patients slather on tobacco, coffee grounds and horse salve in her 30 years of treating spider bites.
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In fact, Philip's DNA was used to squash one of the most enduring urban legends surrounding the Romanovs: That one of the Romanov children survived their gruesome assassination at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
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Viewers of Zeman's earlier documentaries might be familiar with these traits — Zeman used them to good effect in Cropsey and Killer Legends, both of which focused on the potentially true origin stories behind urban legends.
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This makes sense not only in terms of how urban legends and folkloric tropes are passed down through generations but also in terms of the cyclical social anxieties that trigger these kinds of mass panics.
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But until recently, we haven't had such a strong idea of how much and how often young people are actually drinking the stuff, or whether, like jenkem, it's largely just the fodder of urban legends.
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In addition to Latin etymology , movies, and Piero della Francesca, she brings in urban legends and slang – the high and low, or what Clement Greenberg called "avant-garde and kitsch," without ever devolving into the latter.
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Hey Arnold wove urban legends into its empathetic narrative of how hard it can be to grow up — and how rewarding the process can be when you have some friends and a whole lot of imagination.
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How drug deaths are reported on in the media—and in turn how they are discussed in common parlance—is often misleading and sensationalized, loaded with prejudice about drug users and perpetuating potentially dangerous urban legends.
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For some of us, functional marriages may seem like urban legends—they might have existed, perhaps during the age of our great grandparents' coming-to-America love story, but somewhere down the line—the 60s, maybe?
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Even Mr. Goldberg's knowledge of viciously anti-Semitic urban legends comes into play, and the book raises the myth of a Jewish girl arrested in Moscow in 1944 and accused of baking Christian blood into matzos.
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"These reports get circulated, often sensationalized, there's a smattering of rumors and urban legends, and then there's some idiot who actually dresses up, and then before you know it there's lockdowns and arrests," he says. 4.
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Like, what the facts of something are and what the exaggeration of it is," he explains, "[the record was inspired by and] written with this idea of how urban legends end up getting formed among people.
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There are many urban legends flying around London about the startup that got 20,000 downloads in their first month through their amazing growth hacking skills, or the one that had a million views in a week.
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Using analytics from Wikipedia pages of cryptozoological creatures, Insider Data determined which urban legends Americans can't stop talking about, based on how many edits pages of cryptids received, as well as how frequently the pages are edited.
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For more than 20 years, Snopes has been a destination for batting down the urban legends and viral misinformation all too commonly found on the internet, first in email forwards and later in popular but misleading articles.
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Why we love it: There are a lot of podcasts inspired by pseudo-urban legends, many of which are on this list, but one of the newest additions to the subgenre that's piqued my interest is Video Palace.
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Creepypasta stories are a spin-off of early 2000s text art known as copypasta, in which memes, urban legends, and other short, random bits of text that could easily be copied and pasted were passed around the web.
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Something's on your windshield This one is as old as urban legends themselves and usually goes like this: Late at night someone goes out to his or her car on a quiet street or in a deserted parking lot.
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Most of us have heard about dusted drugs or wet weed—though the likelihood of getting tricked into smoking PCP a la Ethan Hawke in Training Day has probably always been slimmer than urban legends might have you believe.
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Johns Hopkins is a lurking shadow that sends ripples of fear throughout Baltimore's black community; Deborah's brothers speak of urban legends regarding university researchers yanking black men off the streets to force their participation in the researchers' medical studies.
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WFMU's blog claimed them to be one of the best audio hoaxes and urban legends, The Runout would name Jud Jud the "most innovative hardcore band of all time," and Punknews gave The Demos a belated five-star review.
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Dr. Queen provided a possible explanation as to why: "Part of the reason there are urban legends and a lack of proper research [about sexual fluid taste] is because there is no money to be made off it," she said.
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Easily one of the most infamous and stubbornly persistent urban legends surrounding a film specifically in relation to the Oscars is that Marisa Tomei was wrongly awarded the Best Supporting Actress for her turn in the 1992 comedy My Cousin Vinny.
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"We found it to be very effective as a way to overcome the urban legends, if you will, about what Facebook supposedly is and it is working very well to drive engagement and overall metrics for us in Germany," he said.
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"The internet allows urban legends to spread instantaneously," said Trevor Blank, an assistant professor at SUNY Potsdam and author of Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, a book about another popular internet-made urban legend.
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These terms have vanished, along with Usenet urban legends such as the "brain tumour boy" Craig Shergold (who wanted to break the Guinness World Record for most letters received), and the persistent rumour that the FCC wanted to tax your modem.
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From there, the character spread to several online forums dedicated to urban legends and horror writing — always appearing as an eerie, terrifying figure who often came for, or was only seen by, children who disappeared with him into the woods.
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The latter most likely played on World War II-era fears of gas and wartime instability; in general, urban legends tend to spread in times of anxiety, when there are low levels of trust in official institutions and sources of information.
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Since its founding in 1994 as an online database to debunk internet urban legends, Snopes has grown to be a reliable site to fact-check stories that — often with little evidence of legitimate sourcing — quickly gain traction on social media.
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General dela Rosa says he cannot confirm the existence of an organized Davao Death Squad, and dismissed as urban legends stories by confessed former death squad members, and even Mr. Duterte himself, of criminals thrown from helicopters or fed to crocodiles.
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False stories spread significantly more quickly and broadly than true stories in all categories of information, but this was more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information, the researchers said.
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And then [CW: Arachnaphobia] there is an outtake from a conversation from our first attempt at starting the show, in which Natalie talks about various bugs invading her home, urban legends around rats and toilets, and lots and lots of spiders. Resources
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One of the most infamous urban legends is the tale of Bigfoot, which is purportedly a large, hairy, ape-like creature that roams forests in the US. The search for Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, makes this legend among the most-discussed in America.
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Lower East Side Storytelling Tour (Thursday) This tour begins with a talk about New York's urban legends (like the sewer alligators) and spills out onto the streets of the Lower East Side to explore the neighborhood where the city's attitude was born.
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Since the family was killed far from the capital of St. Petersburg and their bodies were disposed of in secret, urban legends about their fates proliferated, eventually leading to famous scammers like Anna Anderson and the animated (and not Disney) cartoon Anastasia.
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However, unlike other psychedelic urban legends, such as the man who accidentally drank an entire bottle of liquid LSD, gazing upon your reflection can yield profoundly helpful insights—even if the experience is as terrifying as the urban legend would have you believe.
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There's even a famous Creepypasta (a story that belongs to the vast and popular genre of the same name that trades in horror-related internet urban legends) known as "Candle Cove," which plays on the idea of these eerie collective false memories of pop culture.
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We asked people to share the urban legends from their hometowns and, while none had far-reaching political ramifications, there were definitely a few stand outs that prove just how willing we are to buy into nonsense if it makes for a good story.
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Sam Raimi: He's executive producing the horror anthology "50 States of Fright," exploring folklore and urban legends from around the country, starring Karen Allen, Rachel Brosnahan, Asa Butterfield, Rory Culkin, Taissa Farmiga, Travis Fimmel, Ron Livingston, Elizabeth Reaser, Christina Ricci and Ming-Na Wen.
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"There are a lot of contemporary legends that go back at least to the early 123th century that deal with contaminated food," said Joel Best, a sociology and criminal justice professor at the University of Delaware who has researched urban legends like Halloween candy contamination.
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Article continues after the video below Related: Watch VICE's film on the mystical universe of 'Magic: The Gathering' That said, Pokémon's attractive sharing side, its sunny everyman charm, only holds up if you don't buy into the unsettling urban legends attached to the game.
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Article continues after the video below Related: Watch VICE's film on the mystical universe of 'Magic: The Gathering' That said, Pokémon's attractive sharing side, its sunny everyman charm, only holds up if you don't buy into the unsettling urban legends attached to the game.
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For as long as the internet has proliferated viral chain letters, fearmongering urban legends, too-good-to-be-true morality tales, scams from Nigerian princes, and false conspiracy theories, one website has done more than almost any other to stem the tide of misinformation: Snopes.com.
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The neighborhood is lower middle class with two rival gangs, the Santos and the Prophets, and our heroes are four high school freshmen who are trying to navigate puberty, gang violence, urban legends about heist money, first love, a very cool stoner grandma, and much more.
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There's nothing innately scary about the show's production or Mahnke's delivery unto itself; the fascination is more in the way the show's tales echo the common urban legends that permeate our society, or how the details of one story may tie into famous horror tales like Dracula.
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A 2015 post by Brian Cronin debunking Marvel urban legends found that several editors had never spoken with Yoshida before, which suggested that the rumor was true, but Marvel editor Mike Marts then claimed that he had lunch with Yoshida who showed him a Godzilla memorabilia collection.
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However, urban legends exist all over the world, and we've scoured the globe to find the eeriest and most pervasive ones, from Nessie living in the depths of Loch Ness to a 19th century town in India whose residents seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
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Polybius, the mysterious '80s arcade game "whose alleged existence in the Pacific Northwest is fueled by myth and an obsessive online fan base, and which may have factored in the abduction of two teenage boys" anchors this deep-dive into the enduring power of urban legends.
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The list of ideas also included some urban legends — like the one about the brain only using 10 percent of its potential at any given time, and a debunked story about how bystanders refused to help a woman named Kitty Genovese while she was being murdered.
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That film, which made its US debut last week on the horror streaming site Shudder, exists in a universe where the curses of Ringu and its equally successful ghostly franchise spawner, Ju-On (The Grudge), have survived not as viral videos but as viral urban legends — as memes rather than computer files.
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The series' brazen, goofy escapism embodies a country that was seeing its numerous local subcultures being gobbled up by a national monoculture (symbolized by FBI Agents hunting down various local monsters and urban legends), but it also saw, clearly, the paranoia and darkness animating many on society's fringes, then gave that paranoia voice.
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"We are hoping to become the Snopes of India," Oliyath told BuzzFeed News, referring to the San Diego-based website that, in its 43-year history, has evolved from busting urban legends (Does a colony of alligators make its home in the New York City sewer system?) to fact-checking America's 45th President himself.
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And there's a reason why the world is still making star-struck documentaries about Bill Murray urban legends, while our exhaustion has set in with someone like Jeff Goldblum, a man who burned through whatever mythic zaddy cred he gained in his old age with incessant Instagram posts and albums of piano jazz tunes.
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But it really shouldn't have been a surprise — God's Not Dead is precisely calibrated to evoke both cable news talking points about college campuses as intolerant fortresses of liberalism, and a particular school of urban legends about the humiliation of nonbelieving professors, variations of which have been circulated in email forwards and turned up in a Chick tract.
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It has its own particular mythos, a blend of celebrity status, urban legends, a monster meth-derivative known locally as "tik," and a violence rate that ranks Cape Town 20th in a recent study of the most violent cities on Earth—higher than many high-profile crime-ridden cities in the US, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
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The series was perfectly suited for its target demographic: Gen X suburban teenagers and adults who were learning to use the internet for the first time, logging onto dedicated forums and chat rooms to discuss episode content, to speculate on the theories and their basis in the real world, and come up with urban legends and creepypasta of their own.
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Other more sanguine delegates assured me that Trump would turn out voters who haven't typically shown up in the past, a conviction bolstered by anecdotes that almost seemed like urban legends — as when a Long Island Republican told me about a 91-year-old man who had never voted before but has already registered to cast a ballot for Trump this year.
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Sure, it occasionally made no sense that Mulder and Scully could make huge shattering discoveries about a global conspiracy and then go right back to chasing urban legends down American backroads, but this oscillation between standalone tales and serialized adventures has driven many, many other dramas — mostly sci-fi, fantasy, and horror programs but also the occasional non-genre series, like CBS's detective show The Mentalist.
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The sacred loot has disappeared without a trace, but a shelf of thrillers could be spun from the theories, myths, sightings and urban legends about where it supposedly ended up: hidden in a cave, glittering on the altar of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, carted off to Constantinople, tossed in the Tiber, and, most recently, squirreled away in a sub-subbasement of the Vatican.
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To the north, Amarillo is home to tons of urban legends of its own, including an elementary school that's said to be haunted for various creepy reasons, an antique mall supposedly plagued with the spirit of a woman in a white dress, and an apartment building filled with apparitions, including a pregnant woman who can be seen jumping out of a window, but disappears before she hits the ground.
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Round country bread was soon eclipsed by the baguette, a trend that is explained by all manner of urban legends; from Napoleon inventing the long, skinny loaves so that his soldiers could carry them down the leg of their pants, to the foreman in charge of building the Paris metro begging local bakers to produce bread that could be ripped rather than cut to keep workmen from bringing knives into the underground tunnels and fighting one another.
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