6 Horror Novels About Urban Legends
Which ones do you believe?
An urban legend is a story that becomes folklore because it’s told many times, often down through generations of families and friends and communities. People hear these stories so much that they come to believe they are true.
Often the story tells of something happening to a friend of a friend or someone that someone knows. It’s rarely happened to the person telling the story.
With the advent of the internet, urban legends may not even be confined to a particular place and time anymore. Stories spread like wildfire across the globe and because people like to believe weird things, they don’t think to question the logic.
Most urban legends have a kernel of truth, or at least sound like they might.
But, whether they’re based on fact or not, urban legends are ripe for the picking to use as the basis of a horror story. To take something weird that people already believe and give it a unique twist? That’s storytelling at its finest.
Here are six horror novels based on urban legends. Which ones do you believe?
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Table of Contents
The Bloody Mary Saga – Hillary Monahan
Supernatural urban legend horror
The legend
The legend says that when you say Bloody Mary thirteen times (or some other specific number of times; depends who’s telling the story) into a mirror in a dimly-lit room, she will then appear in the mirror. She may be a corpse, a witch, or a ghost, and is usually covered in blood. In horror stories, she tends to be evil and murderous and hard to get rid of once she’s been summoned.
The story
There is a right way and a wrong way to summon her. Jess has done the research.
Success requires precision: a dark room, a mirror, a candle, salt, and four teenage girls. Each of them – Jess, Shauna, Kitty, and Anna – must link hands, follow the rules, and never let go.
A thrilling fear spins around the room the first time Jess calls her name: “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. BLOODY MARY.” A ripple of terror follows when a shadowy silhouette emerges through the fog, a specter trapped behind the mirror.
But once is not enough. At least not for Jess.
Mary is called again. And again.
But when their summoning circle is broken, Bloody Mary slips through the glass with a taste for revenge on her lips.
As the girls struggle to escape Mary’s wrath, loyalties are questioned, friendships are torn apart, and lives are forever altered. A haunting trail of clues leads Shauna on a desperate search to uncover the legacy of Mary Worth.
The SlenderMan – Simon John Cox
Psychological urban legend horror
The legend
The legend tells of an unnaturally tall, slim man, wearing a black suit with a featureless face. He’s generally known for stalking, abducting, and traumatising people, particularly children.
The story
When Adam Bradford’s sister goes missing, he drops everything to assist the police, travelling up to the isolated village where she lived.
When he arrives at her cottage, however, he discovers a life in disarray and a bedroom filled with cryptic notes and mysterious blurred photographs.
At first he puts this obsession down to some kind of psychological disorder, but after he experiences a series of disturbing events he begins to question whether there is any truth to the myth of the Slender Man.
“I roll the phone’s cursor onto ‘View’ and click the OK button, and a message blooms onto the screen: dont come here stay away it isnt safe it isnt safe”
Dead Children's Playground – Dawn C Crouch
Serial killer supernatural horror
The legend
Many children died in Huntsville, Alabama, during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and were buried in the Maple Hill Cemetery. The legend says that the dead children play on the playground next to the cemetery. Passersby have reported seeing ghostly figures there and the playground equipment moving on its own.
The story
Returning home for Christmas vacation after his first semester of medical school, Arik Ensminger, son of German rocket scientists expatriated to the United States after WWII, resumes his favorite pastime, spelunking.
He looks forward to exploring the limestone caves near his home on Monte Sano, despite news of a serial killer who dumps his victims’ bodies in Drost Park at the base of the cave system.
Things take a surprising turn when Arik joins the search for a neighbor’s missing child.
He stumbles onto evidence of outlawed Nazi activity while wandering through a forbidden cavern that leads to the playground where he discovers the missing child.
“A single swing squeaks, slowly moving back and forth. Others follow. The merry-go-round creaks then spins.”
The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack – Mark Hodder
Alternative history urban legend horror
The legend
The legend says that in 1837, a woman was walking home in south London when a strange man leapt at her from an alley. He held her and began to kiss her and tear at her clothes with his claws. She screamed and he ran away but the next day he leapt in front of a carriage making it crash. Witnesses say the man escaped by jumping over a nine-foot wall, cackling with high-pitched laughter. As more sightings occurred, the wilder the tales and descriptions of him got.
The story
London, 1861.
Sir Richard Francis Burton is an explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman. But his reputation is tarnished, his career is in tatters; his former partner is missing, probably dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne is an unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade, for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin.
Burton and Swinburne both stand at a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders. Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor. Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty and creativity. While the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy.
The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London’s East End.
Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn’t exist at all.
“By God! He’s killed himself!” Sir Richard Francis Burton staggered back and collapsed into his chair. The note Arthur Findlay had passed him fluttered to the floor. The other men turned away, took their seats, examined their fingernails, and fiddled with their shirt collars; anything to avoid looking at their stricken colleague.
The Bell Witch – John F.D. Taff
Supernatural horror
The legend
The legend says that between 1817 and 1821, members of the Bell family in Robertson County, Tennessee, were attacked by a shapeshifting entity, presumably a witch, that spoke to them, could affect the physical environment, and moved extraordinarily fast so it seemed it could be in two places at once.
The story
It’s 1817, and Tennessee is on the western frontier as America expands into the unknown.
In idyllic Adams County, home of the Bell family, there exists a collection of tight-knit rural communities with deeply held beliefs. And even more deeply buried secrets.
Jack and Lucy Bell operate a prosperous family farm northwest of Nashville where life with their many children is peaceful. Simple country life. That is until those secrets take on a life of their own and refuse to remain unspoken.
Much has been written about the legend of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, but the details of the Bell family’s terrifying experience with the supernatural have never been told in quite this way.
For the first time, the Witch has her own say. And what she reveals about the incident and the dark motivations behind her appearance reaches way beyond a traditional haunting.
Forget what you’ve read about this wholly American legend. What you believe you know about the mysterious occurrences on the Bell farm are wrong.
Uncover the long-hidden reality that’s far more horrifying than any ghost story you’ve ever heard.
“It was a dark dream, a violent one. Sometimes in the morning there were bruises along her arms, her neck, her stomach.”
The Remaking – Clay Chapman
Supernatural horror
The legend
The legend says that Mary Evelyn Ford was five-years-old when she and her mother were burned at the stake for being witches in Marion, Kentucky, in 1916. The little girl’s body was buried in Pilot’s Knob Cemetery in a grave lined with steel. The casket was covered in concrete and gravel and a white metal fence with interconnecting crosses was erected around the grave. If you’re there at nightfall, you might see a girl in a scorched white dress. Make sure you stand well back. If she can reach you, she can grab you and pull you into her grave.
The story
In the 1930s, Ella Louise and her daughter Jessica are dragged from their home at the outskirts of Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, in the middle of the night. Ella Louise is accused of using her apothecary for witchcraft, and both are burned at the stake. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses. Some wonder: If the mother was the witch, why is Jessica’s grave so tightly sealed?
This question fuels a legend as their story is told around a campfire in the 1950s by a man forever marked by his boyhood encounters with Jessica. Decades later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a ’70s horror movie inspired by the Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek. Amber’s experiences on the set and its meta-remake in the ’90s will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt herself.
Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a true-crime investigator tracks her down to interview her for his popular podcast. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her, or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again? And again. And again…
“These woods whisper. The pines at your back? You can practically feel the needles bristling in the wind. Lean in and listen closely and you’ll hear their stories.”
Published: 19 September 2022
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