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.

Halloween and Urban Legends is a post from: Pub In The Park

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