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Didn't see a thread for this topic specifically, so I'll bring it up.

Just share some urban legends you know of. You don't have to know if they're true or not, but if you do, prove it! They can be local legends or stories the whole world has heard of.

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The most recent one I remembered was about the Chevrolet Nova. I had heard years ago that it sold very poorly in Spanish-speaking countries. "No va" translated from Spanish roughly means "it doesn't go". Thus hardly anybody in Spain, Mexico, and several South American countries bought one.

Turns out this was false. Despite the name, the car sold about as well as it did in the U.S.A. An equivalent scenario is if a dinette set by the name of Notable was sold in English-speaking countries. "No table" would imply that the consumer had no table, and wouldn't make much sense.

There was a story about a girl at my middle school who was trying to masturbate using a hot dog. Supposedly it broke off inside her and she had to go to the emergency room. Never verified it, but I think the scenario is just dumb enough to be true.

Growing up, there was a story circulating about a woman who placed razor blades in apples and gave them to kids on Halloween. I'm sure I read somewhere that it was fictitious, but I can't for the life of me remember where.

Similar legend floating around when I was a brat was that the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers show was cancelled due to copyright infringement, though in reality it used live action footage from the Super Sentai program, and they had run out of source material.

The threat of razor blades in apples is greatly exaggerated, as pointed out by this article in a sociological journal. However, there have been a few cases of sharp objects found in Halloween loot. Most of those were hoaxes, but I can point you to this news report.

Now, as for girls masturbating with hot dogs...

I'd think hot dogs are too floppy to use for that, not to mention they fall apart easily.

An old legend for my high school was that there was a secret swimming pool in the basement level. The only evidence of this is the strong chlorine smell coming from the basement. The faculty wouldn't deny that there was a pool, but I suspect they're only keeping up the story for laughs.

Yeah, the smell of chlorine was likely from bleach used for cleaning. There's no way there was a swimming pool in the basement and no one new about it.

As for the hot dog, it was supposedly frozen.

Apparently there's a reason why our school never does Theatre productions of Macbeth. It's pretty commonly known by people in Theatre that Macbeth is supposed to be cursed. Apparently, about 10 years ago, when our school was performing Macbeth, during rehersals, lights would randomly start flashing with no one in the tech booth, sometimes all the lights at once (but at different intervals). That's pretty much the best I've got. Nothing interesting ever comes up in our school.

This post has been edited by Octahedron: 10 February 2012 - 04:44 AM

Macbeth being cursed is an oooold folk tale. It has to do with the three witches and Christian superstition. A similar myth is that the 13th studio album by a band will also be cursed (Megadeth reported weird things with Th1rt3en was in production). It's all superstition--the people behind it expect bad things to happen so they connect unrelated things to it.

I'm sure your school would have had those weird incidents if they were doing Hamlet instead, but no one would have dismissed it as a curse.

not too long ago, there were rumors circulating about Lady Gaga being a hermaphrodite I'd be lying if I said I didn't research it to see if it had any truth behind it. All I found out was that she highly supports the fight for gay rights

There's this rather humorus rumor about a "ghost dog" that roams around my town. What a load of bullcrap.