What makes an urban legend
An urban legend is a story told as true, about something that supposedly happened recently, to someone just out of reach: not the person telling it, but a cousin's coworker or a neighbor's daughter. The British writer Rodney Dale, who collected such tales in the 1970s, coined the abbreviation FOAF, for "friend of a friend", to name that always-absent witness. His 1978 collection The Tumour in the Whale was one of the early books on the subject.
The American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand brought the term "urban legend" to a wide audience with The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (1981), the first of several popular collections. His point was that these stories are genuine folklore. They pass from person to person, change with each retelling and exist in many versions at once, even though they circulate among modern, literate people rather than in some remote village of the past. Many are not urban at all, being set on country roads or in small towns, which is why many folklorists prefer the term "contemporary legend".
Most share a recognizable shape: a specific local detail such as a named road or a real cemetery, an ordinary setting, a twist at the end, and often a warning. They are not always entirely invented, since a real event sometimes lies somewhere in the background, but the particular "it happened to my friend's cousin" incident can almost never be traced to anyone who was actually there.
The vanishing hitchhiker
The story is familiar in dozens of versions. A driver at night picks up a young woman by the roadside, often wearing a white dress. She gives an address, then vanishes from the back seat without the door opening. At the address a parent explains that she died years ago, often on that very road, sometimes on that very date. In some versions she borrows a coat, which is later found draped over her grave.
In 1942 and 1943 the folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey published a study of the legend in California Folklore Quarterly, based on 79 accounts collected from across the United States. They sorted them into four versions, the most common being the one in which the address reveals the ghost. A cluster of versions in which an old woman prophesies disaster before vanishing came mostly from around Chicago. Brunvand later traced the motif back to the 1870s, and a Swedish account written down in 1602 describes a woman who joined travelers on foot after a market, made a prophecy and disappeared: a vanishing hitchhiker centuries before there were cars to hitch.
Every region seems to have its own. Chicago's Resurrection Mary, a young woman in a party dress, has been said since the 1930s to accept rides along Archer Avenue and disappear near the gates of Resurrection Cemetery; local historians have tied her to several young women who died in that era, none conclusively. England has its phantom hitchhiker of Blue Bell Hill in Kent. The legend's strength is that it fits whichever lonely road is nearest.
Why some stories spread
Stories that stir strong feelings get retold. In a 2001 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Chip Heath, Chris Bell and Emily Sternberg found that people were more willing to pass along versions of legends that made them feel more disgusted, and that legends with more disgusting details were more widely posted on urban-legend websites. Fear, outrage and a satisfying twist seem to work in similar ways: a story that makes the listener gasp is a story the listener wants to tell.
Other ingredients help. The friend-of-a-friend chain gives a story credibility while making it impossible to check. Real place names make it feel local and true. And legends often carry an anxiety of their moment, about strangers, new technology, lonely roads or the dead. The vanishing hitchhiker took off along with the automobile and the night road, a new way for strangers to meet. Retelling also polishes a story, trimming awkward details and sharpening the ending, the same reshaping that psychologists see when they study how memory works.
Legends also live through what folklorists call ostension, when people act them out. Teenagers drive to the haunted bridge, say the name three times in front of a mirror, or park outside the cemetery to see whether the story is true. These "legend trips" keep old stories alive and sometimes produce new experiences that are then reported as evidence, which feeds the legend in turn.
From photocopies to creepypasta
Before the internet, legends traveled by word of mouth, in newspaper columns and on photocopied flyers pinned to office notice boards. Email chain letters and then social media made them faster and more uniform: a story can now reach millions of people in days, carrying a screenshot as its proof and losing its source along the way. One of the web's best-known fact-checking sites began in the 1990s as a hobbyist collection of urban legends.
The internet also produced creepypasta, horror stories copied and pasted from forum to forum and often presented as true. The clearest example of a modern legend whose origin is fully documented is Slender Man, a tall, faceless figure in a dark suit, created in June 2009 for a photo-editing contest on the Something Awful forums by a user who added him to old-looking photographs of children. Other users built on the character with stories, images and videos until many people met him with no idea he had been invented a few years earlier. For folklorists he offered a rare chance to watch a legend grow from a known starting point.
The lesson runs in both directions. A story's wide circulation says nothing about whether it is true, and a known fictional origin does not stop people from having frightening experiences that they connect to it.
How to check a story like this
Checking a legend is not the same as sneering at it, and a few questions go a long way:
- Who exactly saw it? Can the story be traced to someone who was there, or does it always stop at a friend of a friend?
- Does the same story, with the same twist, turn up in other towns with the names changed? Search for its most distinctive detail.
- Is there a record that ought to exist if it happened: a newspaper report, a police report, a death notice, a gravestone with the right name and date?
- Has the story improved with time? Compare the earliest version you can find with the one you heard.
- What would have to be true for the story to be true, and can any of that be checked?
Folklorists study legends because they are revealing even when they are not literally true. They show what people fear, what they think is fair and what they believe about the dead. A story can be worth keeping, and worth telling well, without being treated as a report of fact.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most famous urban legend?
The vanishing hitchhiker is one of the most widely collected, found across the United States and in many other countries. Other classics include the killer with a hook for a hand, the babysitter whose threatening calls come from inside the house, and the Bloody Mary mirror game.
What does FOAF mean in urban legends?
FOAF stands for "friend of a friend", the distant, unnamed person to whom an urban legend supposedly happened. The British writer Rodney Dale coined the abbreviation in the 1970s, and folklorists still use it.
Is Resurrection Mary real?
People have reported encounters with her along Chicago's Archer Avenue for decades, but no one has established who she was, and local historians have suggested several different young women who died in the 1930s. Folklorists see her as Chicago's version of the vanishing hitchhiker legend.