Local Legends

[Harley]

This morning I watched the pilot episode of Supernatural. The storyline features the "Woman in White" (also known as "The Weeping Woman") legend. When I was around nine or ten, I lived in Indiana. I remember seeing a story on the news about a recent sighting. I was terrified because it was along the same stretch of road my dad took to work everyday. I learned a few years ago that there is a legend of a "dogman" a few hours from where I live. So, I was wondering, are there any legends in your area?

 

[WWGD]

I'm not really sure of a lot of specifics, but books have been written on legends of the surrounding area. I live near Sleepy Hollow, home of the Headless Horseman.

Also, right down the street from me is an abandoned sports complex. Several buildings that've been boarded up. It's a really creepy place to visit and I've gone there with friends since I was little. A lot of people claim to have seen ghosts there. I never have. But in one of the buildings there are blood stains all over the floor and walls.

 

[Vamp Jenny]

We have many legends in Quebec. Most of them come from the time the Europeans first arrived and started knowing about the native americans. We have the werewolf stories (even made a movie out of it), there are rumors of a monster in the Champlain lake... There's also the bogey-man stories (locally called "croque-mitaine") and the "bonhomme sept heures" which is a story parents/grandparents used to tell kids to make them go to bed early.

 

[Kean]

We have the legend of the Lady in the Lake. the story goes that one of the servants of Curraghchase House, when tending a fire in the house, caught flame and ran down the hill at the front of the house and dived into the lake, and drowned. The legend goes that she haunts the lake and can be seen at night, on the lake.

This is the house and the lake.

I've camped in Curraghchase (it's a forest park too) and we made out way down to the house through the forest at midnight, and it was honestly the creepiest thing I've ever experienced.

 

[white avenger]

Here are some that I grew up with:


The Goat Man

http://thegoatman.com/story.htm

I actually met the Goat Man when I was a kid. He would travel back and forth through my part of Georgia, and whenever he would stop for the night, he would put a pot out for people who came to visit him to drop money into. I was only about six or seven then, and the only memory that remains is the AWFUL smell of the man and his goats.


Brownie, the Depot Dog

http://romenews-tribune.com/view/fu...epot-dog-solved-by-readers?instance=home_news


My father was the one who told me about Brownie, and how he would meet every arriving train ay out local train station. We visited his grave site a few times, but when the depot was finally torn down. Brownie's grave site was apparently paved over and lost forever.



And when we were bad as children, my grandmother would always say, "Ol' Soap Sally's gonna come and get you if you don't quit that."

http://www.southernmuse.com/southern/soapsally.html


Those are the kind of stories that I grew up with as a kid, combined with "Mama Aycock's" stories of growing up during the years just after the Reconstruction Period, when Georgia was rebuilding after the destruction dealt by the "hero," General Sherman and his army during their famous "March To The Sea" during the last part of the Civil War. It goes without saying that her, and her parents' memories of that time don't agree with what the history books say about that time.

 

[brinkster130]

I don't remember ever hearing any about where I grew up, but that could be because I'm in such a large city.

Although, I was convinced I went to a haunted elementary school. The old school building meant lots of creaky doors and windows, which clearly meant ghost wandered the halls. There were these jagged tree stumps all along the back boarder of the school that looked like a rib cages that were there because the school was supposedly built over an old grave yard. The school was very old and there we had only one large restroom for each sex that the whole school shared. The bathrooms were insanely creepy and made all sorts of odd noises because of how old they were. All the upper elementary kids would tell the younger girls that Bloody Mary haunted their bathroom and would rattle the windows when kids were in there. I remember pretending to be sick on numerous occasions so I would be sent to the nurses office and could use her restroom (the only other one on the whole campus!). By the time I was in sixth grade I remember telling younger kids about the horrors of Bloody Mary and the haunted girls bathroom that had once scared me so much I refused to go into the restroom. I recently went back into the school to pick up the kids I take care of, who are glad they are boys and don't have to go in the haunted girls bathroom, and stopped in the bathroom and it is still just as eerie and creepy as I remember it from childhood. So clearly the haunted bathroom tales live on.

 

[Vamp Jenny]

I just remembered. There's this social center 10 streets over that used to be a high school. They built this reproduction of an old class with mannequins of a teacher and 2 students. Some people say the mannequins are haunted with the ghosts of a real teacher and real students. The mannequins alone gives me the creep everytime I pass by, but to think they are haunted... *shivers*

There's also a rumor that there's been a very violent murder in an old room that was later condamned and that is now a children playground. Creepy, uh?

 

[zobothehobo]

I think the closest I've heard here was a little tale about a family cemetery across the street from my neighborhood. There's this house and beside it a family cemetery like the used to have... 40 years ago, this used to be the boonies. So anyway... there was a story when i was a child that that cemetery was so small because it was haunted and every Halloween the ghost of the last woman to be buried there would come on the prowl and attack anyone in the cemetery. This is untrue. Just something my family made up to keep us from going in there.

I know lots of houses and stuff here that are haunted. But they're not local legends because 1. the ghosts don't do anything all that bad... and 2. they're not in public places.

 

[BuffyElevated]

I don't know of many local legends about my current town, but back where I come from there was the Farrenburg Light:

Farrenburg Ghost Light, Farrenburg is located to the east of of I-55 between
Kewanee and Matthews on CR 707. The ghost light can be viewed from where
the abandoned train station still stands along the railroad grade.
The train tracks are no longer present. The ghost light is seen in the distance along
the railroad grade. The story of this haunting involves an accident to the conductor of the train at this old train station. While he was checking the train axles, he slipped, falling under the train which decapitated him.

Source: http://www.missourighosts.net/
Also, here you can read about the Hunter-Dawson Home in New Madrid, MO, which is just 15 minutes from where I grew up.

 

[November]

Oh I love reading these! I cant think of any big time local legends near me, but we had tons of ghost stories at the riding school I went to as a kid. There was a big pine plantation across the road where we used to ride, in the 80s the Bridie murderers used it as their burial site. The story goes that they chopped up their victims and buried them all around the pines. Not all the parts of victims bodies were found so the ghosts wander around looking for body parts 😛 One of the murderers recently died in jail so Im sure there are new stories about him!

 

[NY State of Mind]

The chupacabras (Spanish pronunciation: [tʃupaˈkaβɾas], from chupar "to suck" and cabra "goat", literally "goat sucker") is a legendary cryptid rumored to inhabit parts of the Americas. It is associated more recently with sightings of an allegedly unknown animal in Puerto Rico (where these sightings were first reported), Mexico, and the United States, especially in the latter's Latin American communities. The name comes from the animal's reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock, especially goats.

Physical descriptions of the creature vary. Eyewitness sightings have been claimed as early as 1995 in Puerto Rico, and have since been reported as far north as Maine, and as far south as Chile, and even being spotted outside the Americas in countries like Russia and The Philippines. It is supposedly a heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail.

 

[Ianigsy]

I live about ten miles away from Mother Shipton's Cave in Knaresborough. Mother Shipton was a hermit who lived several hundred years ago and is supposed to have predicted the end of the world (sometime in the 19th century...) but there's also a spring in the cave which gradually petrifies anything which sits in the water, so people hang teddies, gloves and things in the well to absorb the water and turn to stone.