How to Make an Urban Legend

We’ve all come across urban legends over time and chances are, we’ve believed some to be true as well. Maybe we still do. But what makes these modern myths so compelling?

The successful urban legend will follow a formula. Every urban legend we have found follows this same pattern. Whether it’s the story about that teacher who microwaved her pet to dry it off quicker or the story about the neighbour who gives out poisoned candy at Halloween, we’ve all been told these stories at an impressionable age.

The formula of the urban legend is partly why the stories seem so familiar and believable; it’s because, in one way or another, we have heard them many times before.

During a Critical Thinking class at university, I discovered how universal these stories were when I surveyed my fellow classmates with a simple question: How many of you heard the story about a teacher in their school who had desperately dried their pet in the microwave oven?

It turned out that every single person, no matter what school they went to, had heard the story. Sometimes the animal in question was a small dog, sometimes it was a cat, once it was a hamster, but it was always an older, female teacher who did it.  Interestingly, the teacher in the story was never our own teacher; it was always one of the other teachers at school that we were vaguely aware of.  But it always ended in the same gruesome, explosive death.

How could it be possible for the 25 of us in the class to have shared the same experience, when most of us went to different schools and some of us were from different cities or even different states. After reviewing a sample of urban legends, I found that they all contained the same six traits.

The good news for us is that the online urban legends follow the same pattern as the oral tradition ones.  Very little has changed in the way that they are told that some of the legends doing the rounds on social media now are the same that were email forwards ten years ago, and are even the same stories that were told from impressionable person to impressionable person in the days before the internet.

An effective urban legend will contain most, if not all of the following elements:

1. It must grab your attention in some way, like a newspaper headline would
2. It must come from a seemingly reliable source, often a ‘friend’ or some sort of authority
3. It must involve a vulnerable individual or group, quite often children or teenagers
4. It must play into our fascination of the horrific, in much the same way a penny dreadful would
5. It must involve something our society fears, which could be kidnapping, gangs
6. It must encourage others to spread the message, which is how they keep going and going

Let’s look at two recent memes that were doing the rounds. In both instances, these were shared as a screenshot of someone’s original post.

1. Notice how both started with a warning, one even going so far as to use ALL CAPS!
2. They both claim to have come from a reliable source (a patient and a restaurant worker) of someone’s with first hand knowledge. Interesting that the urban legend is never from direct, first hand experience.
3. They are both both targeted a ‘vulnerable’ demographic: Parents who fear their children may be abducted and White People who fear the changing society around them.
4. Both stories play with our perverse fascination of the horrific, much like a sensational headline from a tabloid paper sucks us in.
5. Like all urban legends, both of these stories prey on the fears of their target audience.
6. Only the second on explicitly asks its reader to share it, thus ensuring the meme will be shared again and again to more impressionable readers.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Modesto Police issued a press released stating that there was no evidence to support the first meme whatsoever. But that won’t stop people sharing the story or adapting it to take place in other locales or with other variations.

Now that you know the six-element formula of the urban legend, you’ll be able to spot them straight away the next time you come across one.

PASS THIS ON TO YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY A.S.A.P.!!!!!