Modern folklore and contemporary legend — from Slender Man to the Vanishing Hitchhiker.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker is arguably the most thoroughly documented and internationally distributed urban legend in the scholarly record, and the legend that established modern urban legend studies as an academic field. The core narrative: a motorist picks up a hitchhiker, usually a young woman, on a road at night; the hitchhiker gives an addres...
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Spring-Heeled Jack is a nineteenth-century British urban legend describing a mysterious, terrifying figure capable of making extraordinary leaping bounds — apparently enabled by some mechanism in his boot heels — who attacked women, accosted travellers, and evaded capture across Britain from the late 1830s through the early twentieth century. He...
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Slender Man is an internet-born urban legend — a creepypasta entity — depicting an abnormally tall, thin, faceless humanoid figure in a black suit with long, tentacle-like arms, said to stalk and abduct children and adults. He originated in a 2009 Internet forum image manipulation contest and became one of the most culturally significant example...
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The Men in Black (MIB) are figures from UFO and paranormal folklore, described as dark-suited, pale, strange-behaved men who visit UFO witnesses, contactees, and paranormal investigators shortly after anomalous experiences, appearing to warn or threaten them to remain silent about what they have seen. They are said to arrive in large, dark, ofte...
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The Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter of August 1955 is one of the most extensively documented and unusual cases in American UFO and paranormal folklore — a multi-witness, multi-hour encounter by a rural Kentucky family with small, anomalous figures that the witnesses took to be extraterrestrial beings. Unlike most urban legends, the Kelly case has a...
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The Hook Man (also "The Hook") is one of the best-documented and most widely studied American urban legends, describing a hook-handed escaped killer who attacks couples parked in isolated lovers' lanes at night. The legend typically follows a consistent narrative pattern: a couple park at a lovers' lane; a radio or other source warns of an escap...
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Charlie Charlie is a digital-era divination ritual and associated supernatural legend, primarily involving teenagers, that achieved viral global spread in May–June 2015 through social media platforms (principally Twitter and YouTube), became a major news item, generated a brief moral panic in some communities, and then subsided almost as rapidly...
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Bloody Mary is an American urban legend describing a ritual in which a person — usually a child or adolescent — stands before a mirror in a darkened room and repeats the name "Bloody Mary" a set number of times (variants specify three, five, thirteen, or one hundred times), whereupon a terrifying image appears in the mirror. The apparition may t...
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The Black Dog is a spectral or supernatural canine figure — enormous, black, with glowing eyes — associated with roads, crossroads, bridges, lonely tracks, and liminal places, reported across the British Isles and much of Western Europe as a portent of death or ill fortune, and in some traditions as a benevolent guardian. As an urban legend and ...
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"The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs" is a classic American urban legend in which a teenage babysitter, alone in a house at night with the children, receives a series of threatening phone calls; when she contacts the police and asks them to trace the calls, they call back to warn her that the calls are coming from inside the house. The legend, f...
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