Some spooky stories were meant only to scare other people, but by far the most terrifying ones are the stories that ended up being real.
Check before you sit
One urban legend says that you should always check the toilet before you sit down because there might be an uninvited guest underneath. That’s what happened in a San Diego office in January 2015. A six-foot Colombian rainbow boa slid up through the drain.
Yes, a real snake in the toilet, and a big one at that. The good news, if you can call it that, is the snake had slid down into the plumbing from an apartment above the office, so it wasn’t a wild animal or anything, just a pet. Not much more reassuring, though.
Upstairs, but not invited
Hear a creak above you at night? Don’t ignore it. In 2019, a mother in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, came back home, only to find a man, named Matthew Castro, at the top of the stairs. Turns out, he’d been living in the attic above the woman’s daughter’s bedroom.
He’d climb down at night, get some food, and then go back up, just like the legends say about someone secretly living in a person’s house. The officers actually had to crawl back in after him to catch him.
Behind the quiet spot
The only thing worse than finding a stranger living in your home is finding someone’s skeleton. Unfortunately, it’s what happened to workers in Alderley, Brisbane, who found skeletal remains behind a wall in 2022. Police said the bones belonged to a woman named Tanya Lee Glover.
The story about a dead person in the walls was true, it seems, and Glover’s bones had been left there for around 13 years. By far the saddest part is that her family had never filed a missing-person report. They thought she was still alive elsewhere in Australia.
Too real for the set
Funhouses. They sure are creepy places, it’s by design, but one California funhouse took it a bit too far, and the truth only came out in 1976. Filming for the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was taking place in Long Beach, and a crew member moved one of the hanging figures.
The arm came loose, that’s spooky enough, but then it exposed some bone on the inside. Real human bone. Rather than being a simple funhouse model, it was the body of an outlaw named Elmer McCurdy. Nobody even realized he was a real person until that moment.
Not quite finished
The story of a ‘dead’ person waking up at a funeral home is just that, a story, right? Except, no, there have been so many cases of it, including that of Timesha Beauchamp in 2020. She was struggling to breathe, and paramedics tried to help her, but a doctor declared her dead.
So she was taken to a funeral home. Then, the staff at the home opened the body bag and found her inside, gasping for air, but very much alive. They rushed her to the hospital, yet she died two months later because of massive brain damage caused by her being in the bag.
Bought without looking
Be careful what you buy at a storage locker, because it turns out the story about ‘buying’ dead bodies is true. A New Zealand family purchased an abandoned storage locker in 2022. They were expecting to get some old furniture, some valuables, you know, the usual stuff.
But what they actually found was human remains inside suitcases. Real ones. Police investigated and found they belonged to two children, Minu Jo and Yuna Jo, who had been killed by their mother, Hakyung Lee. She’d murdered them and stuffed them in the suitcases.
A noise in the yard
You’re sitting in your garden on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, everything seems fine, everything seems good. Then a body falls out of the sky. That’s what happened in 2019 in south London, England, to an anonymous person who had been sunbathing at the time.
They reported the sudden body to the police, who figured out that the body had come from a man hiding in the landing gear of a Kenya Airways flight. The plane, coming from Nairobi, was landing at Heathrow, and police speculate the body fell as it was landing.
Nine days later
One urban legend says that people have had insects living inside their ears, and only discovered them after going to the doctor. Katie Holley knows all about that. She woke up in Melbourne, Florida, with the feeling that something was wrong with her ear.
Her husband tried to help, he couldn’t find anything, so they went to the ER. The doctor found a cockroach inside her ear canal, as disgusting as that sounds. He killed it with lidocaine and removed pieces, although she had to return later to get the head removed.
Someone else answered
You might’ve heard the stories about voices coming from a baby monitor, seemingly out of nowhere, but there’s some truth to that story. It happened to Marc Gilbert, a Houston local, in 2013. He heard a man’s voice coming from his daughter’s baby monitor.
Later, he reported the incident to the police, who said that someone had hacked the monitor to speak through it, and the police advised parents to take more precautions. Don’t use the default monitor password, and make sure you change your Wi-Fi password to something stronger.
The room behind the service
The funeral home selling body parts. It sounds too creepy to be true, but unfortunately, it is, and it’s what happened at the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado. Megan Hess, the home’s owner, and Shirley Koch, her mother, had dissected bodies given to the home.
They then sold them to medical training companies without them realizing the truth. It gets worse, however, because Hess charged grieving families for cremations, then sold the bodies for profit. Truly disgusting.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
13 strange urban legends that only exist in the United States
The United States has plenty of strange tales & urban legends that we’ve passed down through generations – some of these stories are unique to specific areas of our country.
13 strange urban legends that only exist in the United States
