# List of urban legends
An urban legend, which folklorists increasingly call a contemporary legend, is a story circulated as a true or plausible account of a real event, usually in multiple versions and often traced to an indirect source such as a "friend of a friend".[1](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/what-is-an-urban-legend/) This article lists well-known examples of the genre, organized by region and theme, with the cautionary, horror, and creature tales that dominate collections.[2](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/list-of-urban-legends/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Definition | A story told as true or plausible, in multiple versions, often attributed to a "friend of a friend" (foaf)[1](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/what-is-an-urban-legend/) • [3](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/urban_legends) |
| Scope of the term | Nothing exclusively urban: "Bloody Mary" and "The Hook" circulate in suburban and rural settings; "urban" refers to the modern, educated tellers, not the setting[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php) |
| Preferred scholarly term | "Contemporary legend", used by folklorists and sociologists to avoid the connotations of "urban" and to distinguish the genre from traditional folklore[5](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/urban-folklore-urban-legends) |
| Origin of the term | Richard Dorson is generally credited with first using "urban legend" in print in 1968; Jan Harold Brunvand popularized it with *The Vanishing Hitchhiker* (1981)[6](https://eeriefiles.com/thevault/Modern_Folklore) |
| Scale of the cataloged genre | One annotated A–Z list alone indexes 381 stories, from Alligators in the Sewers to the Well to Hell[2](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/list-of-urban-legends/) |
| Truth status | Bennett and Smith, treating "urban legend" as synonymous with "contemporary legend", note it is usually "impossible to tell" whether a given legend is true[7](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/article/download/35092/38282) |
## What counts as an urban legend
Folklorists apply several criteria before a story enters a list of urban legends: a narrative structure, outrageous content in an everyday setting, anonymous origins, and multiple circulating examples.[8](https://dai.mun.ca/pdfs/clegend/ContemporaryLegendVol.082005.pdf) These narratives circulate as if factual, yet because each plot appears in numerous variants, they cannot be accurate in every detail or at every place they surface.[1](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/what-is-an-urban-legend/) • [7](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/article/download/35092/38282) A legend is a story, which distinguishes it from a bare false claim: popular lists that include one-line falsehoods such as "Clark Gable is Tom Selleck's father" mix genres by scholarly standards.[7](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/article/download/35092/38282)
The same plot also travels. A legend may circulate under several names, swap a car for a train, or replace a newspaper warning with a social-media post without becoming an entirely new story.[2](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/list-of-urban-legends/) Many modern legends have medieval or older parallels; sixteenth-century analogs appear in the story collections of Marguerite of Navarre and in the medical works of Ambroise Paré.[2](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/list-of-urban-legends/) • [9](https://dai.mun.ca/PDFs/cns/ContemporaryLegendAFolkloreBibliography.pdf)
## Classic North American legends
The canon of American urban legends includes several stories so widely repeated that they anchor most collections:[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php)
- **Alligators in the Sewers**: giant alligators supposedly grown from unwanted, flushed-away pets infesting the New York or California sewers.[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php) • [3](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/urban_legends)
- **[Bloody Mary](https://www.edgepedia.org/bloody-mary-folklore)**: the ghost of a murdered girl that appears after one recites "Bloody Mary" thirteen times in a dark room.[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php)
- **The Hook**: a psychotic killer who slew his victims with a hook that replaced his missing hand.[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php)
- **The Vanishing Hitchhiker**: one of the most famous long-lived contemporary legend types, giving Brunvand's 1981 book its title.[2](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/list-of-urban-legends/) • [6](https://eeriefiles.com/thevault/Modern_Folklore)
- **The Killer in the Backseat** and **The Choking Doberman**: frequently cited cautionary tales of the American corpus.[10](https://dialog.puchd.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/dialog-44-Autumn-2024-For-Upload.pdf) • [11](https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/45035?searchresult=1)
- **The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs**: a standard example of the babysitter-peril plot.[12](https://uark.pressbooks.pub/afta/open/download?type=print_pdf)
Creature and cryptid tales sit at the border of the category. The Fandom master list places Bigfoot, Mothman, the [Jackalope](https://www.edgepedia.org/jackalope), Sewer Alligators, the Roswell UFO, and [Polybius](https://www.edgepedia.org/polybius-urban-legend) alongside narrative legends such as the Vanishing Hitchhiker.[13](https://urbanlegend.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Urban_Myth_Legends) Slender Man, a mysterious creature created online, is cited in folklore teaching materials as a contemporary-legend example.[12](https://uark.pressbooks.pub/afta/open/download?type=print_pdf)
## International legends
Urban legends are not an American monopoly, despite the impression of many observers; the genre has spread internationally and every culture produces modern cautionary tales.[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php) • [14](https://www.factumobscura.com/special-feature/special-feature-understanding-urban-legends-folklore-in-modern-society/) Well-documented examples include:
- **Kuchisake-onna** (the slit-mouthed woman) and **Hanako-san**, Japan's most enduring urban legends, tied to public spaces such as [Tokyo Metro](https://www.edgepedia.org/tokyo-metro) stations, Kyoto shrines, and Osaka school buildings.[15](https://handmadelytics.com/painting/japanese-urban-legends) **Aka Manto**, a toilet-stall spirit, is another widely listed Japanese tale.[16](https://hyper-a-in-the-world-of-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Urban_Legend)
- **La Llorona**, **El Silbón**, **Corpo-Seco**, **Loira do Banheiro**, **Saci**, and **Mapinguari** appear on regional lists for the Americas.[13](https://urbanlegend.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Urban_Myth_Legends)
- **The Mongolian Death Worm** (olgoi khorkhoi, roughly "intestine worm"), a [Gobi Desert](https://www.edgepedia.org/gobi-desert) creature said to kill by venom and electric shock; the American paleontologist and explorer [Roy Chapman Andrews](https://www.edgepedia.org/roy-chapman-andrews) described it in his 1926 book, and subsequent expeditions have yet to yield any proof.[17](https://apnews.com/article/22426b638b79e06b1aa997125e72abd3)
- **The White Lady of Balete Drive** in Quezon City, Philippines: a woman in white reported by late-night taxi drivers since the 1950s, said to vanish from the passenger seat; Philippine horror movies have been produced from the tale.[17](https://apnews.com/article/22426b638b79e06b1aa997125e72abd3)
- **The ghosts of the Bintaro train tragedy**: the head-on collision of two commuter trains in southern Jakarta in October 1987 killed 139 passengers, and residents and railway workers have since reported apparitions in old, bloodstained clothing near the tracks.[17](https://apnews.com/article/22426b638b79e06b1aa997125e72abd3)
- **The Wendigo**, from Algonquian tradition, and **Santa Compaña**, a procession of ghosts in Spanish folklore, are frequently cited as regional entries in world lists.[18](https://pastwick.com/historical-figures/from-wendigo-to-kuchisakeonna-20-creepiest-urban-legends/) • [14](https://www.factumobscura.com/special-feature/special-feature-understanding-urban-legends-folklore-in-modern-society/)
- **The Arkansas 365 Hitchhiker of Woodson**, a local phantom-hitchhiker legend, shows how the migratory plots attach to specific places.[12](https://uark.pressbooks.pub/afta/open/download?type=print_pdf)
## Digital-era legends
Urban legends now spread predominantly through the internet, and new subgenres have formed around it, including creepypasta (horror stories copied and spread across the internet).[3](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/urban_legends) Internet-era list entries include Polybius, listed among North American entries on the Fandom master list alongside older creature tales.[13](https://urbanlegend.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Urban_Myth_Legends) Quantitative work finds the genre recognizable by simple textual features: to be credible a legend mimics the who, where, and when of news, while to be catchy it is emotional and readable like a fairy tale, a tension between the credible and the incredible.[19](https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.06081) Epidemic models of rumor transmission likewise treat legends as persistent, usually non-verifiable short tales, and find that a legend can burn out and later be resurrected, eventually believed by a constant fraction of a population.[20](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2846379/)
## Legends in popular culture
The boundary runs both ways: legends feed fiction, and fiction becomes legend. The retinal-image motif, the belief that a murderer's image can be photographed from a dead man's eye, appears in [Rudyard Kipling](https://www.edgepedia.org/rudyard-kipling)'s "At the End of the Passage" (1890), [Jules Verne](https://www.edgepedia.org/jules-verne)'s *Les Frères Kip* (1902), Randall Garrett's "The Eyes Have It" (1964), and [Terry Pratchett](https://www.edgepedia.org/terry-pratchett)'s *Feet of Clay* (1996).[3](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/urban_legends) The sewer-alligator trope runs from Thomas Pynchon's *V* (1963) to the film *Alligator* (1980).[3](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/urban_legends) Gail de Vos's surveys document how legends have migrated from oral tradition into popular culture, where they become stereotyped, standardized, exploited, commodified, and repackaged in print, images, and electronic media.[21](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/39015)
## Study and scholarship
American folklorists began collecting urban belief tales in the 1940s and 1950s, and [Indiana University](https://www.edgepedia.org/indiana-university) in Bloomington became the eminent American center when Professor Linda Dégh and her students began publishing in 1968.[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php) The first international conference on contemporary legends took place in 1982, and the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) was founded in 1988; its journal, *Contemporary Legend*, interprets "legend" broadly to include rumors, conspiracy theories, sayings, and beliefs.[4](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php) • [22](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl) [Reference](https://www.edgepedia.org/reference) works organize the material thematically: Bennett and Smith's 2007 collection covers about 150 legends grouped under headings such as "City Life", "Horror", "Sex and Nudity", and "Animals", imitating Brunvand's type-index.[23](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/39852) Historian Simon Young's *The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends* extends the list backward, cataloging seventy Victorian legend types, most identified through his archival research, in an era when newspapers served as fly-paper for urban legends.[11](https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/45035?searchresult=1)
## References
1. [What is an Urban Legend, Urban Legends Archive](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/what-is-an-urban-legend/)
2. [List of Urban Legends, Urban Legends Archive](https://urbanlegendsarchive.com/list-of-urban-legends/)
3. [Urban Legends, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/urban_legends)
4. [Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales, American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore](https://erenow.org/common/american-myths-legends-tall-tales-3-volumes-encyclopedia-american-folklore/445.php)
5. [Urban folklore (urban legends), EBSCO Research Starters](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/urban-folklore-urban-legends)
6. [Modern Folklore, The Vault @ The EERIE Files](https://eeriefiles.com/thevault/Modern_Folklore)
7. [Sandy Hobbs and Mecca Chiesa (2014). Rumour, Legend, and the Transmission of "Serious" Knowledge. Contemporary Legend](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/article/download/35092/38282)
8. [Urban Legends, Contemporary Legend Vol. 8 (2005)](https://dai.mun.ca/pdfs/clegend/ContemporaryLegendVol.082005.pdf)
9. [Contemporary Legend: A Folklore Bibliography, introduction](https://dai.mun.ca/PDFs/cns/ContemporaryLegendAFolkloreBibliography.pdf)
10. [Folklore and Urban Legends: An Overview, DIALOG 44 (Panjab University)](https://dialog.puchd.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/dialog-44-Autumn-2024-For-Upload.pdf)
11. [Simon Young, The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, University Press of Mississippi](https://academic.oup.com/mississippi-scholarship-online/book/45035?searchresult=1)
12. [Documenting Community Stories: Arkansas Legends and Lore, University of Arkansas](https://uark.pressbooks.pub/afta/open/download?type=print_pdf)
13. [List of Urban Myth Legends, Urban Legends Wiki (Fandom)](https://urbanlegend.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Urban_Myth_Legends)
14. [Urban Legends: Global Myths, Cultural Echoes, and the Psychology of Belief, Factum Obscura](https://www.factumobscura.com/special-feature/special-feature-understanding-urban-legends-folklore-in-modern-society/)
15. [Whispers in the Neon Alley: Japanese Urban Legends and Their Cultural Resonance, Handmadelytics](https://handmadelytics.com/painting/japanese-urban-legends)
16. [List of Urban Legend, Hyper A in the World of Heroes Wiki (Fandom)](https://hyper-a-in-the-world-of-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Urban_Legend)
17. [It's spooky season: scary stories from around the world, Associated Press (2024)](https://apnews.com/article/22426b638b79e06b1aa997125e72abd3)
18. [From The Wendigo To Kuchisake-onna: 20 Creepiest Urban Legends Of All Time, Pastwick](https://pastwick.com/historical-figures/from-wendigo-to-kuchisakeonna-20-creepiest-urban-legends/)
19. [Marco Guerini and Carlo Strapparava. Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral? arXiv:1601.06081](https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.06081)
20. [The Transmission and Persistence of 'Urban Legends': Sociological Application of Age-Structured Epidemic Models, PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2846379/)
21. [Jan Brunvand, review of Gail de Vos, What Happens Next?: Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture, Journal of Folklore Research Reviews](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/39015)
22. [Contemporary Legend, journal of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl)
23. [Bill Ellis, review of Bennett and Smith, Urban Legends: A Collection of International Tall Tales and Terrors, Journal of Folklore Research Reviews](https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/39852)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Philosophy, religion, and mythology › Mythology and folklore › Urban legends and contemporary folklore*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license