Pub In The Park

Before you know it, the month of October will be here again — a month filled with Haunted Houses and Oktoberfest Festivals, with kids and adults dressed up as vampires and ghosts and witches in Halloween costume wigs . In the United States, it’s a month where people free themselves of their usual inhibitions and allow themselves to literally transform and become the creatures that are the stuff of nightmares in scary movies. It’s a time of story-telling, where we come together and review all the urban legends and ghost stories we’ve accumulated from childhood.

For the weeks and nights before Halloween, take in a few of the scarier stories of American folklore . There’s plenty to choose from, such as the Axe Murder Hollow, about a place that you don’t want your car to fail. This old Pennsylvania tale concerns a deadly spirit who haunts the roadside with an axe, a variation of the classic story told about lover’s lanes where a crazed killer with a hook for a hand haunts anyone who goes there.

Urban legends are not usually set in urban areas, but rather countrysides. They are the modern equivalent of folk tales from pre-industrial times, and so they’re mostly known today by sociologists and folklore specialists as “contemporary legends.” The term was actually invented by Jan Harold Brunvand in a collection of books titled “The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings” from 1981. With titles like “The Hook” and “The Death Car,” these tales are more than appropriate for the most supernatural time of the year, October 31st.