This document summarizes and analyzes urban legends. It defines urban legends as modern stories of obscure origin that spread spontaneously in varying forms through people seeking to deal with deep anxieties. Examples of well-known urban legends are discussed. The document also explores how urban legends spread through gossip and retelling, with each person adding their own twist. Many urban legends contain lessons or warnings that create vivid imagery to influence listeners' behavior. Urban legends demonstrate the social constructs of oral storytelling and take on lives of their own as they are perpetually retold and reshaped through social interaction. The document also discusses a mythological/archetypal approach to analyzing urban legend characters and settings that represent societal lessons.

1. Digital Portfolio
Urban Legends
Cornerstone Ids 101 674
Professor David Taylor
By Christina Saur

2. URBAN LEGENDS

3. Legendary Urban Legends
 An urban Legend is a modern
day story of obscure origin and
with little or no supporting
evidence that spreads
spontaneously and varies its
form. The spread of such rumors
or gossip is the result of people’s
hidden emotions and residual
fears of the unknown. The
people fabricate in order to deal
with their deep-seated anxiety
of or frightened psychological
component of their emotions.
“Bloody Mary” (205) “The Hook”
(199) “The death of little Mikey”
(108) “The Kidney Heist”(227)

4. Are Urban Legends based on the
truth or fabrication?

5. Gossip and Rumors
 The prevalence of gossip
is and has been the result
of anxiety-provoking and
ambiguous rumors or
gossip because they
make great conversation
pieces and improve
social relationships. The
evidence of really “juicy”
gossip will spread like
wildfire once heard by
others and will be more
likely to be retold.

6. When Urban Legends are told
there is a high probability
that each person who hears one
will spread the UL with their
own twist to the story.

7. Lesson/Warning
 Many of the Urban
Legend’s contain a
lesson/warning that will
prevail in the mind of the
listener because it
creates such raw visual
imagery or spine-
tingling realizations that
it produces a red-light
response to the listener
and makes them take a
closer look at the way
they are living their life.

8. Urban Legend’s that portray
this theme “The killer in the
backseat”(227) “Aid’s Mary”
(6) “The babysitter and the
man upstairs” (28)

9. Social Constructs
 The social constructs of
an urban legend is the
basis or formality that
spreads the stories
through oral narrative.
A legend is a believed
account of an incident
in the past that may or
may not be true and is
retold anyways.

10. Social Constructs Continued
 “Sociologists regard Urban
Legends as “always emergent
out of interaction and never
finished and thus never
reducible to any original
authentic text.” (399) Since
UL’s are never finished they
take on a life of their own by
the original UL and by being
retold in the future which
embarks on a circular
formation of unending
rumors and gossip through
social interaction.

11. Mythological/Archetypal
Approach
 An approach that
analyzes characters and
settings that epitomizes
ideas or means of a
societal lesson. It
provides a universalistic
method that withstands
the test of time and
utilizes the reasoning
behind why some stories
can become legendary.

12. Disadvantages to the approach
 The only disadvantage
to this type of
approach is the
formation of social
“archetypes” that may
have the person
overlooking the true
essence of the Urban
Legend.

13. Works Cited
Encyclopedia of Urban Legends
by Jan Harold Brunvand