What local myth did everyone know growing up?

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West_Guarantee284@reddit

Ours turned out to be true. It was sort of an open secret, everyone knew that a local farmer had murder his wife but it was never proven. Until 40 years later. People would refer to the potatoes having eyes, meaning they knew the truth and saw what happened, assuming he jad buried her in the fields. Turns out she was in the sceptic tank.

BBC News - David Venables guilty of wife's septic tank murder 40 years ago - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-62153660?app-referrer=webview

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Hippy_Hammer@reddit

Obligatory "that guy was caught bumming dogs" rumours in several warehouse jobs I did as a kid 😄

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RopeyStingray91@reddit

A bloke I worked with many moons ago had a sister who everyone said had intercourse with a dog.

There were all these rumours about her being a porn star and she did it for 10k etc.

Well it was only true wasn’t it 🤢 one of the lads spent a bit of time digging online and found photographic evidence nonetheless. It also turned out it was far, far less than £10,000.

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nightwing_87@reddit

Everyone has a price… 😳

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RopeyStingray91@reddit

I can say hand on heart, with all honesty, I definitely do not have a price 😂🤢

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nightwing_87@reddit

Ha! I don’t know what mine is, but it exists and it’s a lot higher than £10,000.

Pay off my house? Maybe Early retirement money? Probably Generational wealth levels? Definitely

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SunWarri0r@reddit

Carl Slater?

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Hippy_Hammer@reddit

Couple of decades too late 😄

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fightmilk5905@reddit

Taught of his old man.

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SunWarri0r@reddit

Nice username! You fight like a crow? LIKE A BODYGUARD?!

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fightmilk5905@reddit

Detective carl slater to you.

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Nublar_Repair_Man@reddit

Our R.E. teacher once said "my dogs give me pleasure" and we laughed our balls off

She meant emotionally, I think. I hope so.

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justforfunilltryone@reddit

Purple Aki

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flyingfoxtrot_@reddit

Saw a video essay on YouTube about him years back. I was shocked that he was real! I thought he was an urban myth. This was also at the peak of lockdown, so it was already a very weird time without finding out that the playground stories about him were actually true!

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WizardryAwaits@reddit

I didn't live anywhere near Manchester, but when some of us went on a day trip on the train there, some older lads told us to watch out for Purple Aki, because he might squeeze our muscles.

I had no idea what it meant at the time. It was years later when I actually moved to Manchester and discovered that he was a real person, a 6'5" giant, and yes he did hang around stations and squeeze the muscles of young men and boys.

His full story is crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinwale_Arobieke

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Nuthetes@reddit

I grew up in Nottinghamshire and Purple Aki was a local legend to scare people. It was said he used to hang around the garage at the estate and would bum you.

Weird how even before everyone had the internet, everyone knew of Purple Aki. Same as that rumour everyone heard of where Kenan and Kel died in a car crash

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Winston_Carbuncle@reddit

He was very much real. RIP

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Voodoopulse@reddit

The myth was that he was this harmless bloke, the truth is that he was a predator, certainly not rest in peace

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stuaird1977@reddit

Not a myth

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flyingfoxtrot_@reddit

"the witch", an old lady with straggly grey hair who lived in a house with hedges so overgrown they met in the middle and made a kind of canopy. Kids were genuinely afraid of her. It later turned out she was a nice woman who had some mental health problems but had never hurt a fly. Good lesson for child-me about why I shouldn't judge someone by appearance!

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Secret-Wind-8926@reddit

We had the moving statue,it was built on to the back of our middle school, everyone saw it move....did they f*CK😀😀

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GoldenGolgis@reddit

Holly Johnson wrote “Relax” for a girl he’d got pregnant round the back of our scout hut.

(45 years later I am clear that this is unlikely on a number of levels, but as a 9 year old it seemed quite exciting)

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All-Hail-The-Ale@reddit

That the local Chinese once served deep fried battered cat after one fell in the deep frier.

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hairlikebrianmay@reddit

The gang of skinheads who would ask you "can your mum sew?" and if you said yes they would slash your face and say "well tell her to stitch that".

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twobit211@reddit

what if you said no?

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highrouleur@reddit

Then they'd come round and give her lessons. It was just really aggressive marketing

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hairlikebrianmay@reddit

They said "she better learn, tell her to stitch that". 😜

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Jester7s@reddit

Bummer Dave and the Two Quid kid.

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JensonInterceptor@reddit

Man who got his head stuck in the bottle recycling hole and bad things happened

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Own-Lawfulness-38@reddit

Yes because I’m sure the only people who came across him were opportunist rapists

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Nuthetes@reddit

Where was your dad last night?

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SonofLung@reddit

Not really sure who else would come across him?

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Hallelujah33@reddit

Could have been one very enthusiastic rapist

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JCW9525@reddit

I heard by the time they found him, he’d been arse raped 18 times….

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apaperhouse@reddit

That the Winchester city lights from St Catherines hill spell out 'Wasted'. We did confirm that they did, although we were certainly not sober at the time

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jammessi@reddit

There was also the peodo woodwork teacher who was helping a girl with her work. As he walked away he knocked her pencil case onto the floor with his apparently impressive boner. Insert your own Woodwork teacher joke here.

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jammessi@reddit

We had that a worker jizzed in the mayo at the Banbury McDonald's, he of course had Chlamydia and everyone who then ate a mayo chicken contracted Chlamydia.

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M35Mako@reddit

A kebab shop owner in Preston supposedly murdered a girl and used her remains to make kebabs. The town was eating her for weeks, apparently.

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socratic-meth@reddit

Escaped puma lives in the local area woods

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Agreeable_Lynx5321@reddit

Noooo way, we had the exact same myth!! I thought this was just us!!

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socratic-meth@reddit

Lots of people claim to have seen it when I was growing up, the local paper would always give them a good long article about it.

I have only ever seen escaped parakeets there

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Agreeable_Lynx5321@reddit

I actually used to have nightmares where I would wake up screaming about the escaped puma when I was a child. Someone claimed to have seen it in the wood behind the primary school, funny how they were always spotted near primary schools…

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JimmyTheDog@reddit

Then they found out it was just addias, not puma... LOL

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SelectTrash@reddit

I've got a live one in my house (well, he thinks he is)

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Alvinthf@reddit

I assume you mean a cat rather than an necromantic panther…..

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SelectTrash@reddit

To be honest, he's a main coon, so he could be both.

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Fluff95@reddit

It was a panther round here

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A-Willow-Wand@reddit

In primary school one of my classmates saw it! He sadly didn’t get the ball back from there though.

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Bob-Lowblow@reddit

We also had the man the in the woods. You’d hear the birds rustling in the bushes and that really added to it. Made sure I passed it onto the kids I babysat for, who I turn spread it round my old school again. We also had the Mushroom man. He would apparently chase kids around with his dog’s shit offering to sell it to them as mushrooms. He was always out walking his dog and anytime we’d see him we’d all run off, so it was never confirmed by anyone trustworthy if he was actually selling shit as mushrooms. As an adult I’d walk past him on my Saturday morning walk to work, never once offered me mushrooms, just a friendly good morning.

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RopeyStingray91@reddit

Mr Whippy the ice cream man put boogies in his ice creams. (Not sure if this counts as myth but we all believed it)

Local Indian was shut down as they found a Dalmatian out the back preserved in curry powder.

A couple who lived in the town, who looking back most likely had mental or other issues supposedly purchased a hoover from Tesco, used it to suck up dog poo then took it back and said it didn’t work.

The same couple engaged in various sexual acts in the main bus stop toilets.

A lad who was 2-3 years below me, his mum breastfed a cat.

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SelectTrash@reddit

Ours was the local Chinese restaurant that got shut down for stealing cats

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hairlikebrianmay@reddit

A chippy (usually in the next area) was broken in to and when the thieves opened the big freezer it was full of dead dogs.

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spacebopper@reddit

A man in a white van selling MKAT to infant school kids through the fence at break times. I don't remember hearing any actual evidence of this happening though.

Although some myths actually came true, eg the paedo that hid in bushes at school and took photos of teen girls. He was actually found and chased by an angry mob through the school at lunch, quite the scene!

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Night-King-001@reddit

That there was a puma living around near my auntie's house in the woods.

Went exploring one day with my dad to see if it was true (taking our trusty big stick to ward the legendary beast off if we saw it).

We found some rabbit carcasses, and then saw a puma bounding away through a field a few feet away. Yikes.

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hguocthrowaway@reddit

A cute one - there was a house called "Maple Cottage" near my primary school, and all the kids in the area accepted it as fact that the lady with the spotty plane from Come Outside lived there (presumably because to six-year-olds 'Maple' and 'Mabel' aren't too far removed). The fence was quite high so we just thought the plane was in the back garden and we couldn't see it.

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RoyalCactus22@reddit

Don’t go behind the church after dark - you’ll see the headless men carrying the coffin. The coffin is for you.

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DameKumquat@reddit

Guy in the woods who would rape and murder you if you took the short cut through the woods to the station.

He was eventually convicted of a bunch of rapes, but not sure if anyone was actually murdered.

Also Red House Lane was so called because a woman/family was murdered there and there was so much blood they had to knock down that house. And the ones next to it, to build boring 1970s houses in a cul-de-sac. No idea if it's true.

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Otocolobus_manul8@reddit

Chelsea clown vans. Guys from London in clown masks who would kidnap cjildren and stab/mutilate them in the back of a van.

I think the socioeconomic status of Chelsea was somewhat lost on Glaswegian schoolchildren. I can't imaging Tarquin and Rupert giving up the polo for that.

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DameKumquat@reddit

There's a couple council estates in Chelsea too! It wasn't nearly so posh when Chelsea Smilers got the reputation.

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pickindim_kmet@reddit

We have a pedestrian route going under a train track here. It's an old path, as old as the beginning of the railway. The myth was that years ago a train driver hit somebody who was on the tracks and they died. And so he went to that spot to hang himself, and he was discovered one morning by someone walking through who felt his legs as they turned the corner (or something like that). So the myth now is anyone walking through it at night/on Halloween/on this day/that day/whatever will feel his dangling legs.

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VanicFanboy@reddit

In primary school we had benches like this in the canteen.

Whenever we would sit on them on our knees as kids we’d get told off, because apparently “there was one boy who did that and fell off, and scraped all the skin off his shins on the way down”.

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DreamtISawJoeHill@reddit

The Birmingham Piss Troll, there was a night club Subway City (now Tunnel Club) that was right next to a bridge over the canal. Rumour had it someone would stand on the path next to the stairs on the bridge and wait for the patrons to start pissing over the edge, then would run out and stand in the stream. Used to go to the club a fair bit and I have a friend who swears he pissed on them.

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FHFBEATS@reddit

Purple Aki

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Derfel60@reddit

We had a bloke called paedo Maloney who used to walk around with 2 walking sticks, and was apparently a paedo.

We also had a house with a shed in the back garden where there were bodies buried apparently.

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Joanna1604@reddit

We had a big elm tree in the village square that had died. There was a huge (to me) split in the trunk and a cavity inside. It was said that a witch lived there and that if the tree was removed a curse would be cast on the village. I was always very scared of the witch. I remember thinking that I saw a vampire visiting her one day when I went past on the bus!!

They replaced the tree when I was 6. As far as I know the village is still curse free.

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danglingwhalesbaybee@reddit

Conveniently the girl who'd just left college when we'd joined had tried anal sex with her boyfriend, shit on the bed and blamed it on the dog which was then put down.

Also if someone sneezed while you were fingering them they'd break your finger/s.

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notactuallyabrownman@reddit

Heard the first one, second one is new to me though.

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crum8le@reddit

The Catman of Greenock

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Yermawsyerdaisntit@reddit

Wasn’t he real? There’s a picture of him somewhere online.

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stuaird1977@reddit

We had the bombadeer. Some story of a soldier in the war who cut over the farmland to get back his barracks and fell into a bog and died. People reported hearing footsteps after dark when walking along the farm track. I used to take my dog out when I was a kid down the track but not after dark.

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SquidgyB@reddit

Very similar to the story I was thinking of - in the valley below a local lake (Cwm Dulyn) there's a large marshland area which everyone local known not to try and cross.

Story goes that way back in the day some chap on a horse asked a local "how do I get across over there" and pointed directly opposite and across the marsh expanse.

The local advised him not to take the direct route, and take the longer route around the marsh.

Horsey man apparently ignored the advice. When the local turned back round to see where he had gone, only his hat remained on the grassy marshland.

I strongly suspect it was just a "scary story" to tell children (we never did attempt to cross the marsh in all those years, so I suppose it worked), but it's always stuck with me.

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Different-Nerve-730@reddit

That a kid from [insert rough part of town] was addicted to beans and chips and died from malnutrition

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TheKnightsRider@reddit

Peanut butter on balls dog licked it boy

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Samwrc93@reddit

The Fox twins. Supposedly one of the locals had sex with a fox and it gave birth to two wierd fox/ human hybrids.

If anything goes wrong in the village the fox twins get the blame.

I’ve head some great stories about them around a roaring fire.

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TheMarkMatthews@reddit

Gluesniffers in the bushes will molest you and the Punch and Judy man was a pedo

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CaffeinatedDaddy@reddit

Horris shagged his sister.

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Aldoggy25@reddit

When we where in secondary school there was this myth that the local chicken shop bossman would catch pigeons and use them instead of chicken.

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moneydazza@reddit

Standard haunted house bullshit.

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TomAtkinson3@reddit

We supposedly had a guy in a purple Mondeo, who would wear a dress and flash his knob a school kids. Headteacher even did an assembly about it.

And when at primary school, there was a rumour that the homeless guy who lived outside of the library actually won the lottery, but lost his ticket so couldn't claim the winnings

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