Ep 97 What are some Urban Legends Urban legends are short stories typically about death, sex or crime, which are told as if they are true. They spread by word of mouth, the newspaper and any other means of communication to hand. The classic modern examples of the urban legends include the vanishing hitchhiker (a minority of urban legends have a supernatural component), the crocodile in the sewer and the mafia neighbours (young couple robbed have their goods returned by a elderly Italian couple down the road). How old are urban legends? Well don’t be put off by the name. Urban legends can be documented in ancient times and the only reason that they cannot be documented in prehistory is because there was no documentation to be had. In other words urban legends are part of the human condition: we are, as this site has never tired of pointing out, storytellers. But this brings us to an embarrassing question: where are the urban legends of the nineteenth-century? Where is the Vanishing Hitchhiker, the sewer crocodile and the mafia neighbours in the 1800s? After all, the nineteenth century was emphatically not prehistory, there was more documentation than in any other period prior to the 1900s and yet most lists of nineteenth-century urban legends are jejune and all too often based on misunderstandings of what urban legends really are.
