Is there any truth to the madness of Britain’s most-told urban legends? (Picture: Getty Images)
Not so long ago, social media and Whatsapp group chats were ablaze with the scandal of the Amsterdam voice note.
For those innocent few who have managed to avoid the details of the tawdry tale, the viral voice note claimed that a young woman had attended a joint stag and hen do in the Dutch capital and found herself in a bar with private rooms that contained glory holes.
When a mystery penis popped through the hole, the woman decided to throw caution to the wind and start sucking it. When in Rome, eh. But this bar featured a button that, when pressed, revealed who was on the other side. And sadly, this poor woman discovered the mystery willy she’d been sucking off belonged to none other than her own father.
Pretty awful right? Well, it turned out the story was likely to be a load of rubbish. People on Reddit claimed the very same anecdote had been spread around their universities years ago and it turned out to be a joke that Ricky Gervais had even used in one of his stand up shows over a decade earlier.
But the Amsterdam voice note isn’t the first urban myth to sweep across our great nation. In fact, there have been many wild stories that have managed to spread far and wide – even before the internet and social media.
So we decided to take a look back at the biggest urban myths and see if we can trace their origins.
It’s not just the Amsterdam voice note with a murky relationship with the truth (Picture: Getty Images)
The tale of the stretched out snake
If you’ve got a phobia of snakes, this urban legend is likely to give you the willies. Sorry, that word may still make you shudder so shorty after the Amsterdam voice note dramz.
But the story goes that a woman owned a pet python and loved to share a bed with it. We know what you’re thinking, what harm could possibly come from a human sharing a bed with a large pet known to eat humans?
Night after night, the snake would lie next to the woman and stretch out from her head to her toes. She saw this as a bonding moment until she realised that her snake had stopped eating and was refusing meals. When she took the snake to the vets, they told her the snake was sizing her up for its next meal.
Is it true? Unlikely. People on Reddit claim they first heard this tale back in the 90s and others claimed to have heard people call in to radio shows with the story. Also, experts have insisted that pythons simply don’t measure up their prey ahead of a big kill and instead, react quickly by grabbing, squeezing and eating.
The story of the mystery face rash
Spoiler alert, there’s no such thing as a ‘rash you can only get from dead bodies’ (Picture: Getty Images)
This tale will definitely make you feel better about all your drunken snogs with randoms on nights out. The story goes that a girl was out clubbing with friends and met a guy who she ended up kissing. He tried to get her to go home with him but she ended up staying with her friends and took his number instead.
The next day, she developed a rash on her face. She went to the doctors and the next thing she knew, the police had arrived.
Turns out the rash on her face could only have occurred when you come into contact with a dead body. Confused, she offered the police the mystery man’s number and they traced his house and discovered dead bodies in his closet.
Is it true? Again, unlikely. Firstly, this is such a wild tale that if it were true, you’d expect it to be a massive news story, right? And after an extensive Google search, we can conclude that there doesn’t appear to be a rash specifically associated with dead bodies. Plus, this story has done the rounds multiple times over the years.
Most recently, someone claimed a similar story happened to their friend after a Tinder date. Rather than a serial killer, it turned out the man worked in a morgue and had been misbehaving with the corpses. Redditors claimed that they’ve heard the story set in America, the UK and even Australia. One also said they’d heard an older version of the story where the girl gets grave worms from giving a blowjob to a guy who turns out to be a necrophiliac. Yikes.
The legend of the tube corpse
This terrifying tale has given many London commuters the heebie jeebies (Picture: Getty Images)
This is a rather creepy one. But the story is that a girl gets on a train one night and opposite her is a woman sitting between two men. The mystery woman is staring intently ahead, not blinking.
Another man gets on the train and sits next to the girl. As the train slows to a stop, the man gets up and grabs the girl, pulling her off the train. She starts screaming for help when he urges her to calm down and explains that he had just saved her life. He says the woman staring without blinking was dead and being propped up by the two men who had killed her.
Is it true? Like the face rash story, this feels like it would have made national news. But there’s no trace of this tale on the internet – apart from random sites discussing it as urban legend. Other versions of the story say the dead girl and the two gentlemen get off the train and she has scissors in the back of her head. Surely that would have caused a bloody mess?
The case of the Frosties kid and his turbulent demise
There is gggggreat debate over this cereal-based urban myth (Picture: Getty Images/Westend61)
You may remember that back in the noughties, there was a Frosties advert with a young boy and the rather famous jingle that went: ‘They’re Gonna Taste Great’. It seemed to aggravate so many people that rumours swirled that the poor boy had been a victim of bullying and sadly died. Some said he’d been killed by drowning in a bowl of Frosties and others said he’d had pencils shoved up his nostrils.
Is it true?
Thankfully, no. But child actor Sven Ruygrok did face cyberbullying and revealed in 2016 that he now runs his own anti-bullying workshops. Despite the backlash, he said he wouldn’t change a thing about his experience. Well, apart from the ad’s jingle.
The horror of the Leeds Festival poo girl
Festival toilets can be scary places at the best of times (Picture: Getty Images)
Not a story to hear whilst you’re eating but this became a cautionary tale for all festival goers back in 2009. A teenage girl had dropped her phone in one of those long-drop toilets and got stuck trying to retrieve it.
She had to be rescued by fire crew who managed to free her and hose her down to decontaminate her.
Is it true? Sadly for the poor girl, it is true. Some versions of the story claimed she had fallen right into all the poo and wee and was effectively swimming around in it. That’s not true. She became wedged but didn’t actually fall down the toilet.
The 18-year-old told the Sunderland Echo at the time: ‘As I got up to leave I swung my body round to open the door and my handbag slipped off my arm and disappeared down the toilet. It had my phone, ticket and all my money in so if I left it I would have been stranded.’
After being rescued, the poor girl then had to be hosed down and given some replacement clothes by the festival’s welfare tent. However, it wasn’t the end of the festival for her, as she simply carried on partying for the rest of the weekend.
So while it might not be entirely accurate, it’s still a shocking one – and we’re sure an anecdote she just loves to bring up at parties.
The poor babysitter and the mystery caller
This urban myth can crop up today at sleepovers as a scary story (Picture: Getty Images)
A teenage girl was babysitting one night and had just put the children to bed when the phone rang. It was a mystery man who told her to check on the children. She dismissed it but when the man continued to call, she rang the police and they promised to trace the number.
After he called again, the police rang the babysitter and told her the calls were coming from the house and to get out. It turned out that the mystery man was a killer who had murdered the children and was trying to lure her upstairs to be his next victim.
Is it true? Not exactly, no. This particular tale is just the stuff of urban myth but it is believed to be heavily based on the 1950 murder of babysitter Janett Christman. She was looking after a three-year old boy who was already asleep when she arrived. She was raped and murdered by a mystery killer and the case remains unsolved. Thankfully, the three-year old boy was unharmed and slept through the whole thing.
The mystery of the celeb rib removal
Marilyn Manson spoke out to debunk this urban myth (Picture: Toni Anne Barson/WireImage)
It seems mad that something managed to circulate around every school in the UK without the help of social media but back in the late 90s and early noughties, it felt like every schoolkid had heard the tale of the male celeb who had a rib removed so they could orally pleasure themselves.
Some said it was Prince, whilst others claimed it was Marilyn Manson. It was thought that the two lower ribs had been taken out to allow them to bend easily and reach their penis.
Is it true? In the wild world of celebrity, it can feel like anything is possible but this rumour appeared to be totally baseless. It definitely seems suspicious that the rumour first swirled about Prince and then moved on to Marilyn.
Marilyn even outright denied the longstanding rumour in 2019, insisting: ‘What people fail to understand is that the strange character I play on stage is exactly that: a character. In real life, I’m just a regular guy—not the kind of depraved weirdo who would permanently alter his own body to suck his own d**k.’
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From the festival poo girl to the demise of the Frosties boy, we find out what really happened.