Why It Seems Like Everyone Knows the Same Urban Legends
Do you know this creepy urban legend you’ve heard about it in your city? Yes, probably someone is now telling the same story in another part of the country. This is why it seems like everyone knows the same creepy stories wherever they go.
According to Thrillist folklorist Dr. Andrea Kitta , popular urban legends have two things: they are believable and they can be easily disseminated (that is, told orally like a campfire story, or in short jokes on the Internet). In terms of plausibility, urban legends cut a fine line between fantasy and the notion that “truth is weirder than fiction.” These stories tend to tell people like you and me in a setting that might sound familiar to everyone, and are often localized in the area where the story is told. So, the story of the witch who lives in the forest does not take place in any old forest – it takes place in the forest a little further down the road.
Believable urban legends also come from sources a few steps further from the person actually telling the story (“each other”), Kitta says. For example, my college roommate told me a story about a friend of his cousin who found a corpse while they went swimming in an enclosed area of a nearby lake. This is a good start for the urban legend, because the narrator gave the tale some truth, knowing the source, the events are not so strange, I could not believe they happened, and I also cannot continue this to see if it is true.
But how do these stories travel so far and wide? Dr. Joseph M. Stubbersfield, Fellow in Narrative Dissemination and Cognitive Distortion at the University of Durham, says popular Thrillist urban legends “go viral” when they carry some social message and cause emotional resonance. For example, in my corpse from the fairy tale about the lake there is a lesson: do not go where you are not supposed to. The emotional response is disgust and fear. You can tell this story to just about anyone and it will be believable and pervasive. And if I wanted to tell this story in a new place and really captivate my audience, all I would have to do is give it a new color – for example, change the lake, or instead turn it into a river, or into a forest. , or a construction site – and voila! I breathed new life into an already rather old story.
Essentially, Urban Legends is an insanely long phone game. They start out as real events, pranks, or even works of art, and then transform over time as people share them. When you think about it, they are no different from Internet memes – starting with something simple and then turning into something with massive appeal, going from one person to another. If you’d like to learn more about how widely one popular urban legend spread, check out the link below.
Spreading Fear: How The Licked Hand and Other Horror Stories Spread Throughout the Country | Thrillist