25 Creepy Urban Legends That Are Actually True

In one of the largest tug-of-war matches ever held, 800 people lined up on each side of a nylon rope to be crowned the winners at Retrocession Day celebrations in Taipei, Taiwan. Each side pulled as hard as they could, exerting three times more force than the rope was capable of withstanding, causing the rope to snap along with the arms of the two men in front. Yang Chiung-ming and Chen Ming-kuo each had their arms ripped apart between the shoulder and elbow due to the force of the rebounding rope. Thankfully, they were rushed to hospital where doctors spent seven hours reattaching their limbs.

Santa Claus somehow manages to make it down millions of chimneys every year without a hitch – and that’s real magic. Humans aren’t so magical, as a Californian doctor with relationship problems found out. In an attempt to infiltrate her boyfriend’s house. Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac tried to climb down the chimney but got stuck in its confines. Three days later, a housesitter saw fluids dripping down the fireplace and smelled rotting flesh, soon discovering the decomposing cause.

A truly accomplished chef can turn even the toughest meat into a tender, satisfying meal. Chef David Viens must have really thought himself skilled when he tried cooking some tough meat – his wife. After an argument, Viens duct-taped his wife up and found her dead the following morning. Trying to destroy the evidence, he cooked her in a massive pot (yes, her whole, intact body) for four days.

British national Rochelle Harris had a wonderful time on her hiking trip in Peru – until she got back home. Initially ruled as an ear infection, doctors soon found a “writhing mass of maggots” feeding on the flesh of Harris’s ear. A New World screwworm fly had laid eggs in her ear canal which soon caused seething pain down her face and a strange discharge from her ear. Doctors successfully removed the maggots and Harris made a full recovery.

In a serious lesson on food safety, a Galveston, Texas, girl showed up to the emergency room with severe pain in her throat. After x-raying her esophagus, doctors found a piece of metal wire lodged therein. What had happened? Some days earlier, her father was cleaning the barbecue grill with a metal wire brush. Since he didn’t wipe the grill down with a cloth afterwards, shards of metal remained and lodged themselves into the next meal the family cooked, which the girl ate.

One of the urban legends which is often shockingly true is the dead body under the hotel bed. On multiple instances, including 2003 in Kansas City, 1994 in Miami, and 1996 in Pasadena, hotel guests complained to staff about a foul, noxious odor emanating from the room. After hotel staff checked (most times they already smelled something foul and ignored it), they found a dead, decomposing body under the mattress frame.

When visiting a foreign city or country, it’s natural to think the water tastes a little funny. This feeling was stepped way up when vacationing families at Los Angeles’s Cecil Hotel noticed black water coming out of the tap. A maintenance worker went to investigate the source, discovering the decomposing body of a missing twenty-one-year-old Canadian student in the water tank. It’s not sure how her body ended up in the tank but we’re sure those guests won’t be staying at the Cecil anytime soon.

As Jimmy Fallon would say, dead bodies are “ew”. Though some people like to get nasty with dead bodies (necrophilia), we generally shy away from them except during the haunted house craze which pops up every Halloween. It’s a good thing they’re made out of papier-mâché and old bandages, right? Nope. The movie crew of “The Six Million Dollar Man” found out via the accidentally-breaking-a-limb-off kind of way that a prop mummy was no prop at all. In fact, it was the handy-work of an embalmer who, so proud of his work, displayed the corpse in a funeral home, charging visitors a nickel to see it (which they would drop in its mouth). The mummy, train robber Elmer McCurdy, was claimed by his “brothers” a few years later. His “brothers” were actually carnival promoters who showcased the body all over the USA.

Three Columbia University students looking to cheaply redecorate their place found an unwelcome surprise in their dumpster carpet after they got it home. Unrolling their new carpet, the boys found a dead body with two bullet wounds to the head inside.

Jean Hilliard, a Minnesota teenager, was frozen solid after spending six-hours in the snow. Hilliard was trying to find shelter after a car accident and collapsed in the -8°F (-22°C) temperatures on the way to a nearby farmhouse. When finally found and taken to the hospital, her heart was beating eight times a minute and she was breathing two to three times per minute. She survived after being warmed back up by hospital workers and surprisingly experienced no noticeable side effects. Now, if we could only work out cryogenic freezing like in Futurama.

One of the more popular urban legends that makes its rounds through our email inboxes and Facebook walls is that of a stranger stabbing a random person with a needle before whispering, “Welcome to the world of AIDS.” Thankfully, this random-attack HIV-infection method is untrue. (Whew!) But, there is a true aspect to this urban legend. In the only recorded-case of infection by HIV-infected needle attack, inmate Graham Farlow of the Long Bay Jail in Sydney, Australia, stabbed guard Gary Pearce. Though Pearce only had a 1-in-200 chance of being infected, he indeed tested positive for HIV and died from its complications seven years later.

Garbage is a pretty messy thing and is best kept far at bay. Though many people hear urban legends about a child playing in a garbage can being crushed to death in the compactor, this one has actually happened (many times). In one instance, a seventeen-year-old was hiding inside a garbage container when he felt it lift off the ground. He screamed once he realized what was happening but by the time the garbage workers heard him, his body was already being crushed.

A terrifying urban legend relates to human traffickers extracting human fat and grease for use – and the director of Peru’s criminal investigations unit claims they broke up such a gang in 2009. Though a bit exaggerated (the story said human fat was being extracted and sourced to Europe by Italian mafiosos for the cosmetics industry), this is a true urban legend. Members of the gang weren’t selling the extracted human fat to Nivea but rather to shamans and sorcerers who used the fat to make candles for Satanic rituals.

A woman dying from cervical cancer was brought to the emergency room in Riverside, California, one chilly February morning. After administering a host of drugs to sedate her and calm her heartbeat, a nurse pulled a blood sample. She noticed a strange smell and manila-colored particles in the sample and a garlickly smell emanating from the patient’s mouth. Seconds after, she collapsed followed by two fellow nurses. In total, 23 of 37 emergency room workers experienced symptoms from the body. The staff weren’t able to save the dying woman and the only conclusions logically proposed were that either the chemical cocktail in her blood created a noxious nerve gas or the workers were over-worked and over-stressed.

Hitoshi Nikaidoh, a surgeon, was decapitated in his own hospital. The culprit wasn’t some deranged patient or murderer, rather an elevator. As Nikaidoh was entering the elevator, its doors shut around him and refused to open despite his frantically pressing every button. The elevator, with another hospital worker inside, ascended, taking Nikaidoh’s body with it before severing his head.

Ever feel as though you’re being watched? If you were one South Carolina woman in September 2012, you were right. The single mother of five found her ex-boyfriend (who she hadn’t seen in 12 years) living in her attic and watching her through the house’s heating vents. After hearing noises above her bedroom and seeing nails pop out, she sent her adult children to investigate which sent the man fleeing (leaving behind the drink cups he had been urinating and defecating in).

Halloween is a great time to scare our friends with pranks related to the macabre and the dead – except they’re not always pranks. In 2005, a Delaware woman took her own life by hanging herself off a tree next to a busy public road. The next morning, scores of drivers passed by, amused by what they thought was a Halloween decoration just a few days before October 31. Hours later, neighbors realized it was a still-warm body and called the police.

If you think public pools are gross due to little kids peeing in the pool, that will be the least of your worries after reading about this urban legend which turned out to be true. Two days after her disappearance, Marie Joseph was found by a passerby, limp and lifeless at the bottom of the pool. The cause of death? Drowning – two days earlier. Joseph had gone down a slide with her neighbor’s son. Upon landing in the pool, she began to sink. Her neighbor’s son reported it immediately but the lifeguards ignored the claims, not even noticing the dead body at the bottom of the deep end for the next two full days as locals swam above.

The Green Lantern may be just be a comic book superhero (though we hope he’s real and out there somewhere), but an urban legend of a green man wandering Pennsylvania turns out to be true. Also known as Charlie No-Face, Raymond Robinson was a normal boy who took on a friend’s dare to climb a trolley bridge. Reaching the top, he accidentally touched an electricity line which sent 22,000 volts of electricity through his body, severely disfiguring his face. To avoid being seeing by the locals (many of whom were scared by his appearance), Robinson took walks late at night, sometimes meeting teenagers or others who would drive along Route 351 in an attempt to grab a glimpse of him. It’s unknown if his skin was a pale shade of green or if he was just frequently seen in his favorite-green shirt.

It has become well-known in recent years that, before medicine’s understanding of comas, humans were buried alive; to combat this, a string was attached to the deceased’s wrist and connected to a small bell above ground which a caretaker would listen for. Well, this 2011 case proves love can make us blind and crazy. Polish woman Michelina Lewandowska found that out when she awoke in an old TV box, with hands and feet duct taped up, after being tasered by her (now) ex-boyfriend – but Lewandowska was the more clever one, using her sharp engagement ring to break the tape before digging her way out through the earth piled above her.

If being buried alive isn’t enough of a shock for you, how about dying in another type of box for the dead? A morgue locker. Eighty-year-old Maria de Jesus Arroyo was (incorrectly) presumed dead after a heart attack in 2011 and taken to the morgue. Two-thousand-fricken-eleven! (Thanks, modern science.) Funeral workers later came to pull her body from the frigid lockers to prepare her for the funeral. Rather than a normal dead body, they found an unzipped body bag and a corpse filled with bruises – evidence that she awoke in the locker and tried to escape.

After a fire broke out in a freighter’s cargo of lumber, the crew continuously doused the smoldering wood with water over the next 3.5 weeks to keep it from reigniting. What they didn’t consider was other cargo which could be affected. Fifteen hundred tons of tapioca (enough to serve a million eaters) in the cargo hold slowly simmered (due to the heat and water) and expanded so much it nearly burst the ship.

Sparta, Michigan, was rocked by the startling death of fourteen-year-old Caleb Rebh choked to death. While acting at a Halloween experience, Caleb replaced a skeleton hanging from a noose to scare hayride visitors. Though his feet were still on the ground after letting go of the rope, the line was pulled so taut that he soon suffocated as his fellow workers looked on in amusement at what they thought was acting.

Though they look dangerous, escape artists’ stunts are far-from-it. Whether it’s being straight-jacketed at the bottom of a pool or locked in a burning, run-away car, escape artists always make it out just in time – almost. Joseph “Amazing Joe” Burrus, in going for the biggest stunt of his career, was locked up in a transparent plastic coffin seven-feet (2.1 m) down. Above him was three feet of dirt followed by four of concrete, the weight of which came crashing down on him, killing him in another wild but true urban legend.

One of the most fraudulent urban legends out there relates to waking up in a bathtub filled with ice; after drinks with a stranger the night before, you read a note saying you’re missing a kidney and need hospital care. Though this exact reading of the urban legend is false, there have been hundreds of true stories like it. From 2000-2008, about 500 Indians were caught up in an illegal kidney-transplant ring run by four doctors, five nurses, twenty paramedics, and three private hospitals. Many of the victims were day laborers picked up on the streets with the promise of work. Naseem Mohammad was one such man who had his kidney removed in early 2008.