The Urban Legends That Changed Something Real

Brazil's forest guardian, backwards feet and all, ended up in a statute book. A state law of 11 September 1970, signed by governor Roberto Costa de Abreu Sodré, establishes the Curupira as São Paulo's state symbol of the guardian of the forests and the animals that live in them — a spirit handed a legal job. The Brazilian conservation body FBCN had already adopted him as its official symbol in 1958.

Leave an electric fan running in a closed room with the windows shut and you die in your sleep: that is the misconception. In 2006 the Korea Consumer Protection Board, a South Korean government-funded public agency, issued a consumer safety alert warning that asphyxiation from electric fans and air conditioners was among the country's five most common summer accidents or injuries — set a timer, rotate the wind direction, leave the door open.

Within days of the 24 February 2022 offensive, Ukrainians were passing around the story of a MiG-29 ace who had shot down six Russian planes over the capital. Air Force Command asked people not to 'neglect the basic rules of information hygiene' and to check sources before spreading them. In 2024 a decree from President Zelenskyy gave the honorary title to the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade — the unit flying over the city at the time.

Sir John Cowan, the Lord Mayor of London, read out an anonymous complaint at a public session in the Mansion House on 9 January 1838, having held it back for several days in the hope of getting more. The police were instructed to search for the individual responsible, and rewards were offered. Cowan thought 'the greatest exaggerations' had been made and was still confident the culprits would be caught and punished.

Sheep kept turning up dead on Exmoor. In 1983 the South Molton farmer Eric Ley said he had lost over 100 of them in the space of three months, all with violent throat injuries, and the Beast of Exmoor became national news. The Daily Express put up money for video footage; the government deployed a team of Royal Marine snipers to hunt the creature down — a military answer to a rumour about a cat.

Mid-2001 in Delhi, and something was scratching faces in the night. Over 350 sightings were reported, around 60 of them involving injuries, and police released artist's sketches of eyewitness accounts in an attempt to catch the creature. Two people, by some reports three, died falling from rooftops or down stairwells in the panic. The whole incident has been described as an example of mass hysteria in India.

A peculiar skull taken by a settler from the banks of the Murrumbidgee River near Balranald in January 1846 was widely read as proof. By July 1847 experts including W. S. Macleay and Professor Owen had identified it as the deformed foetal skull of a foal or calf, and it went on display at the Australian Museum in Sydney for two days — visitors flocked, and the Sydney Morning Herald reported that many people spoke out about their own sightings.

Newspapers did the spreading. The Gifu Prefecture paper Gifu Nichi Nichi Shinbun ran the slit-mouthed woman on 26 January 1979, Shukan Asahi followed on 23 March and Shukan Shincho on 5 April, and the legend became popular that summer. Rumours went nationwide, and young children were sometimes accompanied home from school by members of parent–teacher association groups — a schoolyard story that changed the walk home.

Zanzibar residents believe the shetani first turned up on the Tanzanian island of Pemba. In 1995 it became the focus of a major outbreak of mass hysteria or panic that spread from Pemba to Unguja, the main island of the archipelago, and across to Dar es Salaam and other urban centres on the East African coast. During a panic many people guard against attack by staying awake outside all night — often huddled around an open fire with family and neighbours.

Red lights floated over the paddy fields of Phachi District in Ayutthaya Province, near Wat Tako, in mid-June 2014, and were widely believed to come from a Krasue — a nocturnal female spirit of Southeast Asian folklore. Hundreds of teenagers turned up to look, thousands on some nights, and their presence reportedly damaged the rice. The landowner said the lights were floating lanterns used to scare away birds.

Offerings still arrive at the shrine dedicated to Nak: lengths of coloured cloth wrapped around the trunk of the Bo tree, plus fruit, lotuses and incense sticks, generally from women seeking an easy childbirth or asking that a husband be exempted from military conscription. That practice carries no date, so the rank comes off the object instead — the shrine was built at Wat Mahabut and relocated in 1997 to the nearby Suan Luang district of modern Bangkok.

Sightings ran from 15 November 1966 to 15 December 1967 around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and the town built on them. Sculptor Bob Roach's 12-foot metallic statue was unveiled in 2003 and the Mothman Museum and Research Center opened in 2006. The annual festival is older, first held in 2002, but it began 'after brainstorming creative ways to attract tourists' — commemoration rather than anyone acting on the story, so the statue sets the rank.

Hanshin Tigers fans leapt from Ebisu Bridge into the Dōtonbori canal on 16 October 1985, over 5,300 of them, and, lacking a stand-in for Randy Bass, threw a plastic Colonel Sanders statue in as an effigy. By the legend's own account that crowd began the curse, so it is where the story starts, not something it caused. Divers and dredging failed. The statue surfaced on 10 March 2009 — KFC Japan buried it on 8 March 2024.

She roams near bodies of water, mourning the children she drowned in the river — the weeping woman of Hispanic American folklore. Her story first appeared on film in 1933's La Llorona, filmed in Mexico. That film is the whole of what her article documents outside the story itself: no instrument, no police, nobody acting on the belief, no shrine. A named work is the lightest rung on the ladder, so she sits last.