There is the Black Volga in Poland, Americans are afraid of the famous crocodiles in city sewers.
Each country and city has its own urban legends. London too has its secrets, and city legends are passed down from generation to generation, taking more and more improbable forms.
For the first time, descriptions of this monster appeared in Victorian England. First, the terrifying creature attacked several women who, in fear, only noticed that it was making long jumps and had claws instead of hands. A merchant who returned from work on a cold evening in 1837 looked at him better. The creature leapt several meters on the high wall of the cemetery, and before it disappeared, in the moonlight it showed its diabolical face with a hooked nose, pointed ears, and eyes glowing in the darkness.
Soon reports leaked to the press, in which the aggressor was referred to as Spring-Heeled Jack - sober-minded editors decided that it was clearly a man with springs built into his heels, which was supposed to allow him to jump. When The Times reported the matter, hundreds of letters began pouring into the editorial office from people terrified of meeting the mysterious demon. The mayor of London awarded a £ 5,000 reward for capturing the beast (the equivalent of £ 300,000 today), but Jack's Spring-Heeled has not been found to this day. The last reports come from the beginning of the 20th century, although later newspapers in the Czech Republic, the USA, and India wrote about a similar essence. No wonder the Victorian era gave us authors like Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle - inspiration was present at every turn.
One of London's most famous urban legends, however, concerns Tower London. The fortress was the seat of the rulers of England for years, but today it is only a monument and a museum. Six ravens (and one "spare") have lived in the highest tower for many years. Legend has it that when the ravens fly away, the kingdom of Great Britain will fall, so the birds have their wings cut and the fortress workers take care of their food. And although guides are eager to say that ravens have lived in the tower since the Middle Ages, in fact, they did not appear until the end of the 19th century, and it was then that an incredible legend arose about their influence on the shape of the country. Why do the birds still live in the tower and are so much loved by the British? Well, thousands of tourists flock every day to see the famous ravens, so it's not in anyone's interest to get rid of them.
It's the same with ghosts. More than a dozen of them officially live in the city, and several hundred nameless people are located in cemeteries, old churches, and hotels. Every year tourists come from all over the world just to see the famous London ghosts with their own eyes. Among them are such unusual ghosts as this ... chicken. According to the legends, Francis Bacon - a politician and philosopher - 1626 came close to discovering that cold preserves meat. To prove this definitively, a friend and a friend went for a walk to Highgate Hill one January morning, where he bought a chicken, gutted it, and stuffed it with snow. By a fatal coincidence, during this walk, he caught a cold so badly that a few days later he died. Since then, a white ghost in the shape of a chicken has been haunting the area, and the last reports about it come from the 1970s. In turn, at a bend near Cambridge Gardens, from time to time at 13:15, a ghost bus appears exactly in the place where the tragic crash occurred in the 1930s. Hotels and pubs also boast about their ghosts, and their centuries-old history and gloomy Victorian architecture make the stories even more likely.
Camden Town is another district that has become legendary. Today, tourists flock from all over the world to hear the latest urban legends about which bar was founded by Blur, where drugs were bought and consumed by Amy Winehouse, and where the most famous British rock musicians fisted. A large part of today's favorite celebrity pubs was built in the 19th century.
"When the bar was built, it was said that the first owner had to remove from today's basement hundreds of skeletons of victims buried there during the Black Plague," says one legend, 82-year-old Eastnor Castle pub owner, Charlie Winters. This is why no bartender working in the underground room lasted long, and items in the bar move spontaneously.
Located a few streets away, The World's End has been operating continuously since 1778, although then it had a different name - Dirty Old Town. The club's underground disco is said to be haunted and it is not known whether the pub's customers see the hangmen floating in the air, because of the place's inglorious past, or because of an excess of interest. The fact is that before the pub was built here, there were gallows in its place, and the convicts in the basement awaited their sentence. They had their last sip of water where Camden Town Tube Station is today.
Anyway, almost every London station has its own ghost or chilling story, and most of the millions of passengers traveling on the tube are not even aware of the dark stories being told about it. And can the ghost stories in the subway be true? It turns out ... yes. Many church crypts and forgotten cemeteries were breached during the construction of the extended London Underground, and many accidental deaths and suicides occurred over the decades. So if someone believes in unquiet spirits, he will find them there. In the documentary "Ghost of the London Underground" produced by Channel 5, underground workers talk about strange work accidents. They happened to meet people dressed in historical clothes at the station, even though the metro is closed at night and random people cannot get there.
Another story was told by Andy Harknes, who worked in the subway for 35 years. In 1982, he made a night tour of the Bank station, the construction of which began with the no longer existing entrance to the crypt standing on the surface of the church. In 1900, the coffins with the bodies were removed and placed where the ticket controllers' room is today.
- I was tasked with checking all elevators, even the old, unused ones, with wooden doors - he says. "I checked the oldest elevator, there was no one in it, so I locked it." As I walked away, I heard a knock on the door. It wasn't the wind, no one was with me, so I thought it was impossible. I continued walking to the controllers' room. I pushed open the heavy two-door door and walked in through it. There wasn't the slightest gust of wind. Suddenly the door slammed shut. It was the last time I worked at this station. There are dozens of similar stories.
The most famous story, however, concerns a ghost train that left Whitechapel station towards the Royal London Hospital through a tunnel walled up today, carrying dead passengers. The myth dates back to the early twentieth century, when plagues, lack of hygiene, poverty and crime resulted in enormous numbers of people dying daily in the streets, transported to hospitals and to cemeteries by every possible route. For the inhabitants of the city of that time, such a story probably sounded like this and it grew into the local color so much that it is told by guides to tourists to this day. Especially that the Whitechapel station still has its gloomy fame, which it owes to Jack the Ripper - a historical figure who in 1888 actually murdered women in the area.
The mysterious stories about the subway are also fostered by the fact that in London there are a lot of abandoned stations and corridors (such as the Strand or Holborn station), closed due to the introduction of new trains for which tunnels were not adapted, poor condition of the stations, expansion of the city in a different direction or savings. According to legends, such stations are home to giant rats, drug addicts have their underground city there or simply homeless people live there.
"The spread is large: from ghosts to cannibals," sum up the people of London, each of whom has heard dozens of such stories. The tunnels from the beginning of the 20th century, which have never been opened, stimulate the imagination in particular ...
Are there any emigration accents among the city legends? Of course! A popular rumor has it that immigrants are chasing pigeons and ducks en masse in London, roasting rats living in the sewers and catching carp in the ponds. This is obviously a gross exaggeration, but this is how an urban legend is born. Indeed, employees of organizations dealing with the homeless described a few years ago cases of emigrants who ate boiled rats or carp caught in the park, but it is hardly a mass phenomenon.
It was similar with "pigeons in Chinese booths" in Poland - 11 years ago, pigeon meat was found in one "Chinese booth" at the infamous (and no longer existing) 10th Anniversary Stadium. Legends about dogs, cats and pigeons in Vietnamese food still circulate today as a warning all over Poland. This is how the rumor arises. Similarly, from time to time, the story of a Pole who woke up in one of London's parks exhausted without remembering what happened the previous night is passed on from mouth to mouth. It turned out that ... an unknown gang cut his kidney out. However, this is international urban mythology, because the same stories circulate around Budapest, New York, Moscow, and New Delhi. And, of course, there will be those everywhere who swear to know the hero of the story personally.
Many city legends also come from a linguistic misunderstanding. The next generation of English youth passes on with fear in their eyes that the name of the Kingsbury district comes from the fact that the houses in it are situated in the place where kings were buried ("bury"). This is not true - the name comes from King's burgh, meaning the royal city. It is similar to the Kilburn region - although residents whisper that the first British Catholics were killed and buried here, in fact only the bourn that flowed here before the city expanded for good.
Currently, British teenagers are telling themselves a story about a girl who got on the subway, and two men and a woman sat down in front of her. They all looked like drug addicts. As the subway started, a stranger approached her, greeted her, and then whispered in her ear - get out at the next station! - The stunned girl obeyed the advice, seeing that the man was also getting off and not wanting to be left alone with the suspicious company. As they got out, the man explained to her that he had seen two men drag a dead woman into the subway and seat her between them. There was a knife in the back of her head.
As is usually the case with such stories, the tellers convince each other that it is pure truth. One claims that it happened to his cousin, another that he personally knows the girl who is the protagonist of this story. This is a feature of this type of story. Is it all true? We'll probably never know that. And that's it!
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