Urban legends rooted in reality: Uncovering the true stories behind them

For as long as we've been able to communicate, humans have been passing along spooky legends and folklore. Most are just exaggerated stories meant to scare and entertain listeners, and sometimes impart some sort of lesson. But the thing about urban legends is, sometimes, they're true. So today, we're going to take a look at some scary urban legends you didn't realize are based on real stories. OK, submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, Here's some weird history. If you grew up in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, then you've probably heard the tale of Charlie No-Face, also sometimes known as the Green Man. According to legend, Charlie was a utility worker who was disfigured in a horrible accident involving acid or an electric power line. You know how Con Ed workers regularly come into contact with acid. Some versions of the story have Charlie's skin turning green. But in every variation, his face melts off. That's the main takeaway here. Charlie allegedly wanders dark, foreboding places, like the old abandoned railway access tunnel in the South Park Township, which is often referred to as the Green Man's Tunnel. For years, local teens have driven into the tunnel hoping to see Charlie No-Face. Some have claimed to see his glowing ghost in the tunnel or along rural roads at night. Many even say they have felt an electrical charge from his presence and had problems getting their cars to start back up after calling out to him. So bring a spare battery if you're going to give this a shot. While the details of his story are quite a bit different, Charlie No-Face was a real guy named Raymond Robinson. Back in 1919, Raymond was playing near an electrical power line and got electrocuted. His nose was burned off and one of his arms, and both of his eyes were scorched. But he survived. Raymond, who was, by all accounts, a friendly man, spent the rest of his life keeping to himself, only venturing out for walks at night when people were less likely to gawk at him. One of the most common urban legends tells of a family who unknowingly lives with a deranged lunatic hiding out in their attic. Over time, the family notices strange things like items that go missing or mysterious things in the trash and begin to joke about having a ghost, all before finally being filleted in their sleep by the crazy person living in their walls. The story is so frightening because it could easily happen. And chillingly, it actually has. It all began on a German farm in March of 1922. Andreas Gruber, the owner, started noticing small things missing or out of place. His family reported the sound of footsteps, and Andreas himself found mysterious footprints, but no person. By the end of March, the source of those footsteps descended from the attic and brutally dispatched Andreas, his wife, their adult daughter, Victoria, Victoria's two children, and their housekeeper, all with a matic, which is similar to a pickaxe. Their bodies weren't discovered until four or five days later, during which time the murderer, whose identity remains a mystery to this day, continued to care for the family's farm animals, which you have to admit is fairly considerate. In 1981, video gamers in Oregon were living in mortal terror of a new arcade game called Polybius that had been popping up in the suburbs of Portland. The game, which routinely had long lines forming around it shortly after its arrival, was alleged to operate like a drug. Gamers became addicted to the point of having hallucinations, amnesia, night terrors, and insomnia. And that was not all. Men in black, who were definitely not doing a fun dance to a Will Smith song, would routinely come by to collect data that Polybius was gathering from its addled, addicted users. And then one day, the game just disappeared. If you can't wait to try this game, you're out of luck. Despite some fake pictures of its cabinet and home screen that had been floating around online for years, Polybius never really existed. The real story is much less fantastic. There was a game called Tempest released around that time that caused some players to experience nausea and motion sickness. And the FBI did conduct raids on a few arcades for gambling, which could be the source of the Men in Black rumors. The urban legend of the Night Doctors, also sometimes known as Night Riders or Klan doctors comes from African-American folklore, predominantly in Georgia and Alabama. The story tells of doctors who would ride around at night abducting Black workers to perform experiments on them. Night doctors would snatch people off the streets and take them to medical facilities to perform experiments on them, including organ harvesting. While the Night doctors themselves weren't real, there are some stories of slave masters on horseback riding around at night in white sheets, pretending to be ghosts, a tradition later continued by the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. Also, stories of white doctors victimizing black communities have roots in true events. During the early 19th century, grave robbing was a primary method of procuring cadavers for medical students. And many African-Americans were powerless to protect their dead. Medical students also really performed surgeries on living people. In fact, southern teaching hospitals would only perform live surgical techniques for medical students on African-American patients. Over time, the stories of ghoulish slave masters riding around at night merged with the stories of gruesomely unscrupulous doctors and became the night doctor's legend. The hook man story generally involves a couple making out in a car on Lovers Lane when they hear a scratching at the door. Depending on which version you've heard, they may also hear a radio report about an escaped lunatic with a hook for a hand, which is kind of a spoiler, if we're being honest. The girl gets spooked and asks the reluctant boy to drive her home. When they arrive at her house, the couple exit the car to find a bloody hook dangling from the passenger door handle. Cue ominous music. There are a lot of versions of the hook man story. Sometimes the couple makes it home safely. Sometimes the boy ends up getting whacked and dangling from a tree. Sometimes it becomes the 1997 slasher film, I Know What You Did Last Summer, which is partly inspired by this urban legend. These tales spread like wildfire around 1950. The real-life Moonlight Murders had recently plagued Texarkana in 1946. Wearing a sack with eye holes cut out over his head, an unknown man began picking off couples parked in their cars at night. Terrified residents had to be home before curfew each night as authorities on both the Arkansas and Texas side struggled to identify the elusive phantom killer. They never did, and the phantom disappeared into the night. While that guy didn't have a hook for a hand, many experts think the Texarkana slayings inspired the Hookman legend. Others believe it's no more than a cautionary tale to discourage teens from having sex. According to locals of Quitman, Arkansas, the Dog Boy was a cruel little kid who liked torturing small animals and eventually moved on to bigger animals, like his own parents. Today, he haunts the house where he terrorized his parents, appearing as a dog-human hybrid ghost that still delights in inflicting pain on anyone or anything. Allegedly, those who pass his house can see him peering out of the front window. And some have even been chased down the street by a spectral beast on all fours. Witnesses describe Dog Boy as being a large, shaggy, dog-like creature with the eyes of a cat, which is kind of confusing. Like, pick a theme, guy. While there never was a Dog Boy, there was a particularly nasty character named Gerald Bettis. As a kid, Bettis had a habit of collecting neighborhood animals to bring home and torment. His compulsion became so bad, he eventually had an additional room added to the house just to keep his animals. Bettis grew into a mammoth of a man, standing at 6 foot 4 and weighing 300 pounds. He was known to be abusive to his parents and was suspected of fatally shoving his father down a flight of stairs. He also neglected his elderly mother, keeping her cooped up and rarely feeding her. Adult Protective Services eventually had to step in and take his mother out of the house. Bettis was eventually sent to prison for growing and selling weed out of his house. and, luckily for the rest of us, he passed away behind bars. Everybody knows about Bloody Mary. All you have to do in order to conjure this malicious spirit is to light some candles, dim the lights, and mutter Mary's name while staring into a mirror. Once she appears, there's a whole host of potential things she might do that range from the benign to the downright terrifying, depending on which version of the story you've heard. Give it a try when you're bored sometime. Bloody Mary may not be real, but according to some psychologists, it is possible to see someone else staring back at you if you gaze into a mirror long enough. Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo calls the phenomenon the strange face illusion. According to him, if you stare at your own face in a mirror long enough, your visual field will start to distort. Lines and edges will begin to lose their distinctions, and your face will begin to look different. It's all connected to a phenomenon called pareidolia, and is also the reason people see things like seeing faces in inanimate objects. So the next time you see Abe Lincoln's profile burned into a Pop-Tart, you know the proper medical term to tell the newspapers. As far as these things go, the Alice killings is a fairly new urban legend that has started circulating in Japan. The story goes that a string of homicides happened in Japan between 1999 and 2005. At each crime scene, the name Alice was always written somewhere nearby in the victim's blood. Some versions also claim that police found a playing card carefully placed at each scene. The legend claims that police made an arrest in 2005 when a suspect was found wearing a jacket that belonged to one of the victims. The arrested man claimed the jacket was given to him by a demon with no face. But of course, there was no arrested man because there were no Alice killings. The urban legend appears to be inspired by a real life guy known as the Playing Card Killer, who terrorized Spain's capital city of Madrid around 2003, claiming six victims and injuring three more. Apart from always leaving a playing card At the scene of each crime, there was no clear connection and no apparent motive, so authorities had little to go on. Alfredo Galán Sotillo eventually confessed to the crimes, but he changed his story multiple times and ultimately claimed he had been forced to confess by a mysterious third party. But conspiracy or not, Sotillo was sentenced to 140 years in prison. The Blackwater urban legend begins with a family purchasing a new home. Everything is perfect until they turn on a sink and murky, black, sour-smelling water comes out. They check the water tank and discover a rotting corpse has been floating in there for who knows how long and contaminating the supply. Exactly how this story got started is unknown, but we do know that it's happened for real at least once. In 2013, the body of Eliza Lamb was discovered in the water tank of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The circumstances surrounding her untimely end remain a mystery, but her body had been in the tank for a week until guests began to complain of sour-tasting water coming out of taps and shower heads. When maintenance went up to check on the water tower, they discovered Lamb's body. We're assuming most of these guests checked out early.