Episode 25: Urban Legends pt 1 | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend
https://louisvillehalloween.com/the-legend-of-pan-lives-in-the-heart-of-cherokee-park/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/urban-legends-ky/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_in_the_backseat
And just in time for the creepiest month, we have a two-part series on Urban Legends! I am so excited about these episodes, you all don’t even know.
So first off we need to define what an Urban Legend is. Per wikipedia, an urban legend is “a genre of folklore comprising stories or fallacious claims circulated as true, especially as happening “a friend of a friend” or a family member.” It will often lean towards the scarier side of things, and will usually have some sort of cautionary element or moral lesson.
Like quite a bit of folklore, urban legends originally circulated via oral storytelling, the sort of “I heard from my friend who heard from her brother who heard from his friend…” etc etc, though now it can spread via pretty much any media.
The phrase “urban legend” as used in the folklore sense first appeared in print in 1968, with the phrase coming in to the pop culture lexicon in 1981 with the first in a series of popular books by English professor Jan Harold Brunvand, the first book of which was The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings. And quick plug, if you all want some vanishing hitchhiker stories (which I would argue are the most famous American urban legends) go back and listen to episode three where we discuss quite a few of them.
Interestingly, social scientists in the past few decades have started tracking the popularity of various urban legends to explain social beliefs like attitudes towards crime, childcare, nutrition, transportation, and other choices that hit close to home specifically for the more traditional nuclear family homes.
And then I just have to throw this fact in before I talk through an urban legend or two for you. The United States Dept. of Energy now has a division called “Hoaxbusters” that deals with computer distributed hoaxes and legends, including the urban legend format of choice for the internet age, the creepypasta.
Now that we’ve got the history out of the way, I’m going to quickly talk about two urban legends. First up we have a classic, “The Killer in the Backseat”, which some listeners may also recognize as “High-Beams”. In this legend, a woman is driving alone in her car at night, followed closely by either a pickup truck or a semi. The mysterious truck driver tailgates the woman super closely all the way to either her house or a gas station, depending on the story, flashing his highbeams at irregular intervals. The woman is sure the driver has nefarious intentions. She finds out once she reaches her destination that the driver noticed a man with a large knife sneak into the woman’s backseat when she wasn’t looking, and the driver flashed the highbeams whenever the man lifted his knife to stab the woman.
In a variation on this, the woman stops for gas. When she goes in to pay, the pump flags a problem with her credit card. She goes in to see what is going on, when the attendant tells her he or she (the gender of the attendant changes depending on the telling) that the police are on the way because when the woman was busy with the pump the attendant noticed a man sneak into her backseat.
And a third version that I actually hadn’t heard of before has the woman driving when a person (usually a woman) runs out crazed with fear and bangs on the car. The woman eventually drives away, only to encounter the woman again. No matter how fast the woman drives or what direction she goes this person always shows up, banging the car. The woman calls the police, who agree to meet her at her home. When she meets them there, the officers find the killer in her car. The killer ends up confessing to a string of murders, and the person who kept banging on the car matches the description of one of his victims.
Versions of this story have been in circulation since at the least the 1960s, with a big boost in popularity when it was published in an Ann Landers column in 1982. And for those who don’t know what an Ann Landers column, thank you for making me feel old (or I guess for not having grown up in the U.S> stealing the newspaper from your parents which is less hurtful).
This one may be loosely based in reality! Which I hate! In 1964 an escaped murderer was found hiding in the backseat of a car, having snuck in when the operator wasn’t looking. But, this is an American urban legend and we are a lawless wasteland so in the real life case, when the driver noticed the murderer in the backseat he shot him dead.
The other urban legend that I want to very very briefly touch on is the Living Pan statue in Cherokee park here in Louisville, KY. And for those of you who have never visited here, Cherokee park (apart from being named by someone who fetishized Native Americans and named all the parks after peoples who never lived in this area) is stunning. It’s acres of hiking trails and bike trails in the heart of the city. It’s got a paved running path, lots of beautiful statues, and some good playgrounds. It’s also terrifying to drive through at night, which sucks because cutting through it is really convenient. There’s deer who might jump in front of your car, not a lot of light, lots of twisty winding roads, and just a general air of creepiness.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that one of the weirdest statues in the park has an urban legend attached to it. Per the legend, on full moon nights, the statue of the Greek god Pan at Hogan’s Fountain gets up and walks around. I can’t track the origins of this one. I can’t find when it first showed up in the pop culture lexicon, but it’s all over ghost hunter websites when you look up Louisville or Kentucky.
I did find a fun theory about where the legend may have come from though! The good people over at Louisvillehalloween.com went to Cherokee park on a full moon to see for themselves. And at first thought they couldn’t see the statue, though they could see the white base of the statue! The theory though is that because the statue is so dark it blends into the night since there’s no lighting around, and the contrast between the dark statue and the white base make it appear to have disappeared. But who’s to say, perhaps if you go to Cherokee park on a full moon and open a bottle of wine you’re offering will be deemed worthy of a visit from Pan himself.
And that is my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanako-san
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuchisake-onna
https://yokai.com/kuchisakeonna/
Okay so this particular dive into urban legends can be SQUARELY blamed on my husband. Hunter was playing a video game inspired by the works of Junji Ito, horror mangaka extraordinaire. He GLEEFULLY started telling me about some of the more contemporary yokai being featured in the game, though he politely did not show me imagery. Junji Ito is a master of his craft but my god, even the cute comics he makes about how much he loves cats are unsettling.
Specifically, Hunter told me about kuchisake-onna, or the “Slit-mouthed” woman. An associate professor at Kokugakuin University, Iikura Yoshiyuki, considers her to be the first purely Japanese urban legend. Now, Kuchisake-onna traditionally appears as a beautiful woman whose mouth has been slit from ear to ear. How she got this way varies from story to story.
In early variants dating back to the Edo period, she was the mistress or wife of a samurai caught in adultery
In more contemporary versions of the story, the horrible cuts are caused by, among other things, a freak accident at the dentist
Side note, I’m already spooked by the dentist office, this DOES NOT HELP
Another modern variant says that a jealous rival woman fucked up her face.
So now this lady has a … is it appropriate to call it a Glasgow Smile when the recipient most patently Does Not live in Scotland?? Anyway, in death, the woman becomes an onryo, or malevolent spirit.
In the 1970s, a story started making the rounds in newspapers in Japan about a woman wearing a face mask approaching children and asking “Am I pretty?” and if the child answered in the affirmative, taking off her mask to reveal her mutilated face and saying “And now?”. Responding “No” in terror resulted in murder, saying “yes” got the victim mutilated in the same way as the apparition. The story TERRIFIED the schoolchildren of Japan, and lots of Parent Associations organized walking students to and from school to help assuage fears. Over time, things calmed down, especially as students shared the best ways to thwart kuchisake onna. You could respond with indifference, unfazed by her appearance and telling her that her looks are average. Or you could throw things at her to distract her while you escape–popular options include money or hard candy. Which, I’m just saying probably would distract me, too.
After the initial, viral spread of the story, things calmed down, but Kuchisake-onna stayed on the minds of researchers, especially once the concept of urban legends was introduced. To quote a 2019 article from Nippon.com, “The term “urban legend” came to Japan via a 1988 translation of American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand’s 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker. The up-and-coming Japanese researchers who conducted the translation are said to have wanted to overturn the idea in the academic world that oral literature meant only old tales and legends, and to open up the possibility of investigating the gossip and rumors of the contemporary city.”
Interestingly, Kuchisake-onna regained her popularity with the spread of the internet! The stories cropped up on forums and made their way into pop culture, ranging from appearances in manga and video games (World of Horror was the game Hunter played), as well as horror films (which I will never watch, thank you very much).
Speaking of pop culture, that’s actually how I first heard about the other contemporary yokai urban legend I decided to learn about! I was perusing the manga at Barnes and Noble and noticed a really weird title- Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun. I was like, “oh that’s a weird title!” and immediately put it out of my mind to go pick up the latest copies of Akatsuki no Yona instead. And then I started googling Urban Legends of the world and stumbled across Hanako-san! Who haunts toilets!
Typically Hanako is a young girl (though there are male variants, hence “Hanako-kun” – kun is an honorific used almost exclusively for young boys), whose spirit haunts a school’s bathroom. How she came to be haunting the bathroom varies between tellings, but it’s always tragic. Some of the most common variants are:
She was so severely bullied that she committed suicide in the school bathroom
She was killed by a parent (or another adult, usually a stranger if not her parent) in the school bathroom
Or she was a student during World War II who was hiding in the bathroom during an air raid.
After death she’s doomed to haunt the school toilets, where, students have been saying for decades, you can summon her. However, summoning her spirit is risky. You might get pulled to hell via the toilets which sounds extremely icky to me! Or if someone else enters the bathroom while you’re summoning her, a three-headed lizard will come scare you off. The whole three-headed lizard thing really seems to come out of left field for me, and other than seeing it mentioned in everything I read about Hanako-san, I’m still not sure what it’s deal is.
Much like Kuchisake-onna, Hanako-san has featured heavily in contemporary pop culture. In addition to the aforementioned “Toilet-bound Hanako-kun”, the ghostly child has featured in several other manga and anime, including one called GeGeGe no Kitaro, which I really need to check out– the author has been cited in SEVERAL scholarly works about Japanese yokai that I’ve read and I want to know more about her body of work.
One last side note: I found an Atlas Obscura article, link in the show notes, of course, and Japan has a genuinely astonishing number of yokai and ghosts who haunt bathrooms. Like. It’s shocking. And fascinatingly, folklorist Michael Dylan Foster equates this to bathrooms being a liminal space, which sort of blows my mind. To quote the article, “Foster describes bathrooms as liminal spaces in that they connect the normal, everyday world to a whole different realm, namely the sewer. “In that sense, the bathroom is a place of transition, and the toilet in particular is a portal to a mysterious otherworld,” says Foster. “Even though we generally flush things down, it would not seem surprising for something mysterious to come up through the toilet.”’
And that’s where I’m gonna leave you because wow I hate it? And I have no one to blame for this but myself.
