7 Creepy Urban Legends That Happen to be True (Part 5)
Halloween's nearly here, and that means Cracked is once again out to prove the tales that scared you shitless as a kid could actually kill you as an adult. As we've shown four times before, sometimes those stories that happened to a friend of a friend can actually happen to you.
The Killer Phone Call
The Legend:
Your mother always told you not to answer the phone in a thunderstorm. Lightning could travel through phone lines and fry your brain she said. Of course the whole "stay away from the phone in a thunderstorm!" thing is just a bit of techno-phobia perpetrated by old people who still haven't figured out how to program the clock on their VCR, right?
The Truth:
Tell that to the parents of 17-year-old Jason Findley who found their son laying in bed with the phone to his ear -- not exactly an unusual position to find a teenager in, but this time something was different. This time, Jason's heart wasn't beating. Lightning had caused an electrical surge to shoot through the phone and into Jason's ear, stopping his heart cold. On the upside, by going all the way and dying from the electric shock Jason at least spared himself one hell of an "I TOLD YOU SO!" from his mom.
"But my phone doesn't have any antiquated wires attached to it" you say, "I only use my cell phone! I'm safe, right?"
Think again. It turns out talking on a cell phone during a storm can increase the severity and deadliness of lightning strikes. So in other words, if you're in the middle of a storm just turn off the cell phone -- you don't want the last thing you hear in life to be a telemarketer trying to sell you a new long-distance plan.
The Monk's Mysterious Luggage
The Legend:
It always seems like certain people get through airport security with far less hassle than others. Sometimes you can't help but wonder, what if the kind of person least likely to arouse suspicion (like say, an elderly man who works for the church) was actually carrying a terrible secret in their suitcase?
The Truth:
When the security crew at the Athens airport began a routine check of a seemingly harmless Greek Orthodox monk they had no idea they were about find themselves deep in the middle of some serious Dan Brown shit. See, in addition to regular monk-essentials (bible, spare robes, head polish) this monk had decided to fill his luggage with bones. Human bones.
The monk had an excuse though -- according to him the bones belonged to a saint, and he was simply transporting the treasure to another monastery. Now, maybe it's just us, but stuffing a saint in your carry-on seems a bit disrespectful, but hey, at least he didn't just wrap the bones in bubble wrap and drop them in a mailbox.
Of course it turned the bones didn't belong to a saint at all, but instead to a nun who had disappeared from her convent four years earlier. How she died and what the monk was planning to do with the bones remains unclear, but police think he may have been planning to pass the bones off as a fake religious relic which he would charge people to see and touch. So in other words, if the nosy security guards at Athens airport hadn't foiled his scheme, Scooby Doo probably would have.
Hopefully this article is now the #1 Google result for the term "attach razor blades to his cock".
Forget bird flu, chickens will cut you.
There's an extra layer of weird to this one though -- unlike the chimney death we already told you about, Joseph wasn't immediately found once he started to stink up the joint. In fact, he continued to hang wedged in the bank's chimney for 27-years, his flesh slowly rotting from his bones as his friends and fellow townspeople did their banking below. So yeah, add "your neighbour who went missing may be decomposing somewhere in the building" to the list of reasons why you hate going to the bank.
Arrgh! Jesus! Wait a minute...hooray!
"There might be alligators in your house, but they probably won't devour your children...at least not immediately" qualifies as a happy ending, right?
What...the...hell.
Suuuure, she's totally a saint. 10 bucks to touch her, 20 for a commemorative photo, 100 and you get 20 minutes alone with the bones, no questions asked.
The Revenge of the Killer Chicken
The Legend:
There are plenty of stories circulating that involve animals taking bloody revenge on their cruel masters. It's easy to see why these stories are effective -- it's satisfying to hear about animal abusers (a group almost everyone can agree have it coming) getting their comeuppance, but at the same time, there's something about these tales that hits home. Could your cat be planning an uprising over your decision to start buying the cheap kibble? What about that shock collar you bought Rover? Could you be the next victim of deadly pet vengeance?
The Truth:
That's the question Jose Luis Ochoa should have been asking himself on his last day alive.
Actually, there are a lot of questions Jose should have been posing to himself about his path in life. He had already been arrested for staging cock-fights in the past, and these were no honorable tests of chicken fighting mettle-- oh no, Jose would attach razor blades to his to cock to make sure the fight was as gory as possible.
Those razor blades would prove to be Jose's undoing on a fateful late-January day when police stormed one of his fights. During the melee one of Jose's chickens saw it's opening and took it, slicing through an artery in his leg and leaving his heartless owner to bleed to death near the ring where so many of his feathery brethren had been sent to die.
The Burglary Gone Bad
The Legend:
During renovations of an old building, workers find something far more disturbing than the usual asbestos insulation and black mold -- the body of somebody who tried to break into the building, but never left alive.
The Truth:
It was the summer of 1984, and Joseph Schexnider was a wanted man on the run from the law. Perhaps he thought he needed money to start a new life, perhaps he was just looking for some place to hide -- we may never know exactly why Joseph decided to crawl down the chimney of the local bank in his hometown of Abbeville, Louisiana, but we do know it was a pretty terrible idea. Those who read last year's urban legends article know crawling down a chimney is a short route to a horrible death, and sure enough the bank's chimney soon became a vertical casket, suffocating Joseph to death.
Just stay out of these things guys.
There's an extra layer of weird to this one though -- unlike the chimney death we already told you about, Joseph wasn't immediately found once he started to stink up the joint. In fact, he continued to hang wedged in the bank's chimney for 27-years, his flesh slowly rotting from his bones as his friends and fellow townspeople did their banking below. So yeah, add "your neighbour who went missing may be decomposing somewhere in the building" to the list of reasons why you hate going to the bank.
The Girl in the Closet
The Legend:
You start to notice small things amiss in your house -- things disappear, objects move, noises are heard.
"Probably just a rodent that crawled in here somehow" you assure yourself, but you know deep down that's not the answer. You can feel another human presence in the house with you, but couldn't be possible. Or could it?
The Truth:
A 57-year-old Japanese man began to notice food disappearing from his kitchen and decided to set up a series of cameras in hopes of catching the culprit. Shockingly, what he caught on camera wasn't the hungry rat or racoon he was expecting, but a strange woman. Assuming she was a burglar, the man called the police, but when they arrived to search the house, they found the door was locked and all the windows were undisturbed. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that anybody had broken in -- in other words (cue dramatic strings) the woman had been in the house all along.
After a thorough search the woman was found nervously huddled in a small cupboard -- and here you thought a jumping spider was the worst thing you could find in the back of a dusty old cupboard.
Hey, sorry about drinking all the milk.
Apparently the woman had snuck into the house and slept, ate and even took showers there for a year without being detected. Think of all the things you've done in your most private moments -- the things you thought nobody would ever see. Now imagine a homeless Japanese woman had been watching it all. Yeah. We'll let that one sink in for a moment.
The Worst Possible Place to Wake Up
The Legend:
The mourners pass by the casket giving their last respects. It's your turn, and as you look down into the coffin you think, "wow, they did a great job, she almost looks like she's still alive!"
That's when the corpse starts screaming.
The Truth:
It all started when Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, a woman from the northern Russian city of Kazan, suffered a heart attack, and was rushed to the hospital by her husband. At the hospital she was declared dead by a crack team of physicians, who we suspect may have actually been on crack at the time, because it turns out she wasn't dead at all.
If Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov appears to be alive to you in this picture, you're probably not a Russian doctor.
The didn't stop the woman's family from quickly putting together a funeral for her -- a funeral she rudely interrupted with her screams of terror when she awoke and realized where she was. But hey, while having the body at a funeral sit up and start wailing like a banshee is a bit freaky, in the end your loved one isn't dead after all! That's good news, right?If Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov appears to be alive to you in this picture, you're probably not a Russian doctor.
Right! Except in this case Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov promptly died again. For real this time.
The shock of waking up at her own funeral was simply too much for the poor woman and she suffered a second heart attack that totally, 100% for-sure killer her for good. At least according to the excellent medical staff that declared her dead the first time. Apparently in Russia the safety coffin is still considered an in-demand technology.
The Baby in Peril
The Legend:
There are tons of terrifying tales out there detailing the things that might be menacing your baby as soon as you let it out of your sight for a split second.
In fact, if there are any new parents out there, go ahead check on the kid. Are you back? There wasn't anything hunched over the crib trying to devour the baby? Okay good, glad you're feeling reassured, because you're not going to be able to enjoy that feeling again for a while after reading this.
The Truth:
A woman (who police have declined to name) left her 3-year old son to play while she cleaned up the house. This mundane slice of everyday life was interrupted when she noticed her boy playing with something behind the couch, and soon discovered he had found a new playmate -- one that happened to be a 6-foot long alligator. Thankfully the boy wasn't hurt, but anyone who's been reading these urban legends articles for a while knows we can't finish this entry on a happy ending.
With that in mind, we take you to South Africa where according to reports babies are being eaten by giant rats the size of cats. We'll repeat that -- babies are being eaten by giant rats the size of cats.
Not only are rats attacking toddlers, but apparently they have a particular taste for the eyes of their victims. Oh, and just because they're freakishly huge doesn't mean they're not sneaky, as they've been able to kill kids while their parents slept only a few feet away.
Hey, want to check on the baby again?
Nathan Birch also works for IGN, creates his own frightfully cute webcomic Zoology and can always use a few extra Twitter followers.
