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Are you ready for more urban legends? We’ve prepared three more for you!

1. There’s life after cryonic death

Already overly used in countless movies, books, cartoons, video games, crossword magazine last page comics and whatever else, the whole freezing people up for them to come back to life later (supposedly decades or even centuries) seems to have been proven a tricky practice to nail with current technology. If anything, scientists prefer focusing on cryogenic preservation which entails a completely different practice and definitely won’t be keeping anyone alive for dozens of years, but instead prolong the time doctors have to operate on people experiencing severe blood loss.

But I diverge. Because a freezing, living body is more likely to go into hypothermia and then, several degrees under the normal body temperature, have its vital organs flat-line after amnesia and loss of body control kicks in, cryonics are still a long way away from making the science fiction thing a reality. But this myth might turn out to not be impossible after all as there is someone out there who has lived through it to tell the tale. Going by the name of Jean Hilliard, she is the lucky survivor of such an experience.

Having been found frozen solid in the snow by neighbors, she was brought in the hospital and pretty much declared a goner. Even if she wasn’t found to be dead, doctors stated that the temperatures that her body had been subjected to would most likely be the cause of severe brain damage. Then again, they proceeded to wrap the body up in an electric heating pad to begin the thawing; not much later, Jill Hilliard’s eyes popped open and curious inquiries regarding her own location were uttered from the person lying down in a heating pad, supposedly believed dead or at least a mental goner.

Not only that she seemed to not be affected in any way whatsoever by the cryonic nightmare, but her body didn’t display any form of frostbite or freezer burns and she was able to resume her normal life happily. How this occurred is still a mystery to doctors, but as we all know, it just takes one exception to make researchers realize it’s possible.

2. Voices from the walls

I remember being in my bed one night, back when I was a child, dozing off happily when I realized the reason I wasn’t managing to fall asleep was a constant, muffled meowing I could hear from the wall on the right side of the bed. The wall that separated my room from the house’s gym room that surely did not contain any kittens.

I never found the source of the sound, but I did struggle to fall asleep for several hours as I could swear the meowing was coming from INSIDE the wall. There is a number of similar urban legends – of course, involving human beings instead of cats – that speak of people being walled in in strange, inexplicable circumstances.

That’s no urban legend however, as real life Joseph Schexnider was found in a very baffling predicament. In an old building used by Abeville National Bank, when management ordered the renovation of the second level, workers found secret after secret. First they found that a large plate covering the wall by being bolted in place hid behind it an old, out of order fireplace.

That didn’t surprise anyone at first as the building was relatively old and the scenery wasn’t in any way unusual. But then came the first discovery that made the workers uneasy – cloth scraps and tiny bones lying on the floor inside the chimney. Because that wasn’t enough and further inquiry was required, the workers looked up inside the chimney and conveniently enough found a full-fledged human skeleton stuck in the narrow passage.

While the DNA tests revealed his identity, tissue tests revealed something even more frightening: the poor man had been wedged and stuck in the chimney for 27 years. The reason he was never found was the fact that the second floor of the building was barely ever used so his shouts for help were never heard. Nor were the usual signs of decease felt by anyone, come to think of it. The reason behind the poor man’s whereabouts remained just as big of a mystery.

3. Dark water. Real life dark water

If you’ve ever watched the 2005 remake of the Japanese film Dark Water (going to use the Hollywood remake as an example because most people have probably seen that, not the original), you most likely took it for what it really was – a fictional horror movie. While the movie’s interpretation of the dark water was simply the vengeful, restless presence of a spirit from beyond the world because that’s how horror movies work, this little story depicts things in a more literal way. Literally.

Take your low-mediocre hotel in downtown Los Angeles. You won’t expect it to be heaven, but you’d at least hope for decent bathing conditions. Guests at the hotel in question started noticing problems with the water they were getting from their taps. You know how after your water has been cut off for operations on the pipes, the water coming out from them will be brown and dirty for a while until the things clear off? Residents here weren’t even getting that, they were getting black water and the weakest pressure you could imagine.

God knows why it took guests at the hotel nearly a week to actually report the issue to the management, but eventually it happened so someone was sent to check things out. The hotel had four cisterns that it drew its water from and they all seemed alright – with the exception of one. Nothing big really, just the decomposing body of a woman tainting the water people were getting to that shocking extent. Nobody knew how she ended up there – whether it had been an accident, suicide or something that would make the story even scarier. You know what’s the scariest thing though? Guests at the hotel kept drinking and taking showers with said water for nearly a week. Yup.

So much for the urban legend status. Information travels fast, and over the length of all ages of mankind, word of mouth made sure that everyone was aware of the craziest, most attention worthy events that came up in people’s lives. In an age ruled by internet, information is even more ridiculously easy to come across – including erroneous, false affirmations that one or another came up with to serve their own purposes; or simply for fun. But at times, things can go the other way around: something that has always been considered a simple urban legend suddenly receives ground and proof that it is in fact, true. Sit down and grab your blanky, because this is going to be scary.

1. Carnivorous escalators

Something that our parents told us when we were kids, right? Tie your shoelace so you don’t end up like those boys on the news that got eaten by the escalator because they didn’t. Yeah, sure. You grow up, it never happens to you, and probably even end up telling your kids the same. And thank god you do because that couldn’t be a more real danger.

There have been several cases throughout the world of people getting literally chewed up by escalators. The rogue shoelace getting stuck in the gritty, metallic stairs going up with no possible stop idea couldn’t be more terrifying until you actually think about it a little. Once the shoelace is in, there’s no getting it out – trying to take your shoe off becomes a little difficult when the caught shoelace keeps tightening around your ankle. What happens after? Well, documented cases speak of toes and feet partially getting chewed off by escalators; upon trying to free themselves, victims also risked other parts of their body – most often their hands. In one case, a man got strangled by an escalator as he bent down to free his shoelace and got his hoodie caught in it as well.

2. Beware of your local mall and/or leveled hyper store.

Ever got the feeling you were being watched?

This is inadvertently becoming a “creepy” list of things that happen to be true too soon and too fast, but that’s urban legends to you. This one might be familiar to many people as it has circulated on the internet quite a lot and falls into the urban legends king category. I have personally never felt like I was being watched but many individuals claim it’s a real thing – not just something you have seen in movies. So the urban legend says that your 6^th “someone’s watching me” sense starts tingling before you discover that despite your home security, a malicious stranger has in fact invaded your home and definitely did not bring banana bread to repay your hospitality.

In most cases, that is surely only Hollywood movie material. In one particular case however, it turned out it wasn’t. Few years ago in Japan, a man (although not claiming any 6^th sense tingles) kept finding things amiss in his home such as missing food, objects not where he’d put them despite his home being safe and no hint suggesting there had been a break-in at any point. Out on a whim, the man proceeded to set up cameras in his home to clear out the mystery; after everything was set and done, he checked the footage the next morning.

To his horror, the video entailed a woman crawling out of one of his cupboards and going around his home to only return to the cupboard after everything was over. Upon the police’s arrival, a homeless woman was indeed found hiding in the house, in the very cupboard that she had crawled out from on video. While you’d think that’s pretty bad, turns out she had been living in the man’s house for nearly a year, eating, sleeping and even bathing there whenever he left.

3. Shrunken head tales were actually inspired from reality. Amazonian reality.

While everyone uses the shrunken head thing as a fun – or scary, depending on genre – element addition to their stories and voodoo-themed media, very few actually ask themselves where the trend actually started from. And that’s the case with so many thematic appearances in a lot of videos, films, books and whatnot.

Such goes the story of the shrunken heads. How WOULD you get a shrunken head anyway? There’s no way that was real at any point in history. Well, surprise, it was. In tribes from around the Amazon more specifically. While it wasn’t a very broadly popular practice and was barely seen anywhere else across the planet, head shrinking seems to have taken place until late 19^th century in said tribes.

The way they did it was cutting the back of the severed head, skinning the skull, sewing the eyes and mouth shut, boiling it and then drying it with hot rocks until it became a mass of… tissue that you could mold into a head-like shape. While these were kept as trophies most likely, it soon became more of a sport and trade as tribes started hunting and killing enemy tribes just for head-collecting – all because of traders offering guns in exchange for the tokens. This trade actually continued until the 1940s until it was finally outlawed. That’s awfully late if you ask me.