I was born and raised in the city and I have heard the urban legends that circulated since I was a little girl. The first urban legend that I heard was the asuwang. It is a local werewolf where a woman, usually it is a female, turns into a creature that has a separated upper and lower body. The upper body has wings and it flies to seek potential victims. And the way to kill that asuwang is to put salt and crushed garlic on the lower body which is left standing in the house of that asuwang. Talks like that would come up once in a while when I was growing. Of course, I had believed that and like an ordinary girl, I was afraid to come out at night alone (although we were not allowed to do that). It only occurred to me that it was just a legend when I was already in college. Now I understand that talks about vampire or asuwang is a prelude to a movie.
Yes, I guess we all had our urban legends that we grew up hearing about. There is one that I wish would go away though and that is the one about the black cat. Of course there is that urban legend that this type of cat is bad luck. That is they cross your path you will have bad luck. This so isn't true, I have a black cat and he is the sweetest most loving pet I could ask for.
I find your forum post quite amusing, esp. about the garlic 'antidote' to ward off these imaginary spirits lurking about (in your country, :-D). Garlic does put people off the users of them, LOL! Here's an example: How the kangaroo got its long tail and a wombat a flat forehead. Interesting folklore. http://www.sacred-texts.com/aus/mla/mla14.htm
Sometime in the 1980s, there was this talk about a human snake seen in the fitting room of a big boutique in a new mall. An actress was named in the issue, purportedly one of those who saw the human snake. And that human snake is the son of the mall's owner. That talk had blown up such that tv networks interviewed the actress Alice Dixson who denied the alleged story. But even with the denial, talks still persisted for a time. Some analysts said that the rumor might have been a creation of their competitor. Robinsons mall is competing with SM, the largest mall chain in the country.
Kids are kidnapped for their internal organs. This was exposed by Ted Failon, a respected radio commentator who is also an investigative reporter. He had featured that issue last year although he had no clear evidences. All he had were testimonies of children who were near-victims of the kidnap gang. The place is the province of Bulacan. Yesterday, there was a news like that in the province of Batangas. The governor of the province issued a statement for people to be calm. She also exhorted the media to report accurately because there are no clear proof of the abduction of children. Most of the testimonies of the would-have-been victims can be treated as hearsay.
My granddad came here from what is now Slovakia, back in the early 1900's. He was about 12-13 years old and was sent over to visit family for a year, then was to return. Well, rather than return he ran away, but that's another story. He used to tell me things about living in Slovakia. One was a story about how a deranged man climbed up a church's belfry, tied a rope around his neck and jumped out a window. He hung outside the bell tower until he was found and cut down. Later, there was the black outline of his body on the church's wall that could not be removed or covered up. Another time, some of Gramp's family was in a group of neighbors who were chasing bandits through the Tatra mountains where gramps and family lived. The bandits made it to their cave hideout and were well armed, but they were surrounded and eventually killed. All those in the group who were in on the chase and killing divided up the contents of the cave. There were firearms, silver items, jewelry and household goods. Gramps said anyone who took any of the items died an early death, and the area around the cave made one feel very eerie and unwelcome to be there.
In the early 1990s, there was this issue of some crazy guys in the mall holding a syringe, who would inject you with a fluid that contains HIV virus. Isn't it a crazy idea? But the media would take advantage of that rumor and even blow up the issue. We have a neighbor named Joseph, he was in high school at that time, who told me the story of his classmate who got injected with a syringe in the mall. When my husband got home from work, I relayed the story to him and he frowned then got hold of the phone and called Joseph. Here is how the phone conversation went.... H: hello, can I talk to Joseph? J: hello, yes, who is this? H: this is captain Nievera of the police department. I am investigating this HIV syringe. I've heard that you have a classmate who was victimized. J: No sir, no such thing sir. H: Are you sure you have no classmate who was injected with that HIV syringe? J: No sir, none sir, none, nothing. Now we have an idea how those rumors fly in the first place.
May I go back to the issue of asuwang? I just remembered that sometime in the early 2000s, there was this documentary made by the famous broadcaster named Noli De Castro. The footages were taken at night. It's all about 2 cousins, young men who believe that there was an asuwang in the vicinity. They were followed by the camera wherever they would go in trying to find their haunt. They said they could smell that asuwangs were just around the corner. As expected, nothing came out of that 1-hour show but bravado and strong words. Nothing, nada simply because asuwang is just a fictional character like werewolves and yetis. Would you believe that the broadcaster became the vice president of our country? That's how our voters vote, huh.
I was trying to decide where to put this post, and I guess this topic might be the very best fit for it. It is kind of one those "maybe or maybe not" stories. There is a new video on the internet that shows what looks like a pteranodon flying in the Idaho skies. Since I grew up in Idaho, I had to watch the video and then see what other information there might be on the subject. It turns out that there seems to have been quite a few creditable sightings of something that sure appears to be a living raptor. I found pictures and videos from China, South America, Montana, and Texas , just to name a few. Some of them, it was hard to see clearly enough to tell if it was just a large bird (like an eagle), but in some of them, you can clearly see the strange head shape of the pteranodon. The one that was filmed in Idaho was near Boise (southern Idaho), which is close to some of the large Idaho Wilderness mountains. It has mostly never been explored, and it would be perfectly possible for even a large bird like this to go unnoticed, unless someone happened to be close enough to see that it was not just another eagle flying around. Here is a short video that shows an old Civil War era photograph of a pteranodon that was shot by some soldiers. You can definitely see the look of the head and body is nothing similar to any known bird that we recognise today. Since there are so many unexplored areas of the earth, I think that this could well be another one of the creatures that we have considered to be extinct, but are still surviving in remote areas.
The current urban legend that is circulating is about the presidential candidate Grace Poe. She is an adopted daughter of Fernando Poe, Jr. a.k.a. FPJ who was called King of Philippine movies and who ran for the presidency in 2004 and had lost to the incumbent Gloria Arroyo. Anyway, the legend is that Grace Poe is actually the daughter of the former president Ferdinand Marcos who got Rosemarie Sonora pregnant. This Rosemarie is the sister of Susan Roces who is Grace Poe's adoptive mother. It's kind of confusing but the gist is that Grace is a niece of her adoptive mother who is wife to FPJ. Although that myth was denied so many times, it still persists because until now the biological parents of Grace Poe cannot be found.
I live in a city full of urban legends, come of them dating back to the time when Spaniards ruled here, such as the legend of "La Llorona" (The Weeping Woman) who was supposed to have taken place in the capital city of the New Spain, but her ghostly specter haunts in almost any place Spaniards inhabited, from North US-California to South Argentina. However a common urban (and relatively more modern) legend here is the Headless Horseman, legend I heard for the first time when I was 3 or 4 years old. By that time I lived in a community house with my parents, and someone told me that the Headless Horseman used to appear by night by the entrance gate, which was at the end of a corridor that was always dark as hell. Don't ask me why the Headless Horseman was riding that place because I never knew it, but i remember to be scared to death fearing to see him sometime, LOL
@Carlota Clemens that headless horseman reminds me of my husband's anecdote when he was a teenager. He was invited by a classmate for a brief vacation to Abra, a province that was remote and primitive - no bridges, no electricity, no water system. On their second night, my husband and his classmate Macoy took a stroll after dinner. They were telling scary stories to frighten themselves, hahahaaa. Take note that there was no electricity so only the moon provided light on the road. Suddenly, there came a headless priest who was floating on air. My husband and Macoy were shocked and both couldn't move. And before they could faint and lose consciousness due to unimaginable fear, they noticed that a boy was holding a hanger that holds the priest's white habit (attire). So that is also the reason why the headless priest was floating because the boy was carrying it up high. Just a newly laundered priest's vestment.
This is not an urban but still a modern legend that occurred in the 1990s. The teenage boy named Judiel Nieva claims he sees the apparition of the Virgin Mary in the forest, in the town of Agoo, province of La Union (5 hours travel from Manila). The natural curiosity of the people created crowds to watch the boy kneeling and praying to a tree that purportedly has the image of the Virgin Mary. What's funny is that people started to see things like the dancing sun which is an indication of the presence of the Virgin Mary. Worse, the crowd multiplied that included Joe De Venecia, an aspiring presidential candidate and Tito Sotto, a senator. They fell for the scam of that teenage boy.