We hear stories and local legends, and like with Fairy Tales, urban myths have a way of hanging around, being retold, shared, and handed down through generations sometimes. Smaller and more local than the grand Myths, Monsters and Legends that end up being known through various lands. These ones being relevant to their location and time, and often with threads of truth running through them, but have had their own element of ‘Chinese Whispers’ added over the years.

But I watched an interesting documentary about Staten Island, and of their urban legend called Cropsey. Now, I have already been looking at certain islands around that area, with Coney Island being mentioned in my articles A Train of Thought and Being Real, linking them to ideas of enticing young people to islands with promises of fun and freedom. Also, Ellis Island has not gone unnoticed as a central hub of movement, looking like an ordinary processing centre when told it was for registering immigrants to America, but it seeming like so much more now. But Staten Island is different, and as they say it, became a dumping ground. Not just for vast amounts of rubbish and waste from New York, but for the ill, disabled and infirm, with many buildings being used as hospitals, testing sites, disease control sites and so on. And it was only because of a missing child, in fact a number of missing children, that it became a very real focus point for many at that time. It seems there have been an awful lot of occasions where people, and more alarmingly children have gone missing and never been found, or what their final fate was. Becoming new legends and myths in people’s lives.

And many of us might remember such strange stories from our childhood, or have heard various legends of places along the way. A few films below that come to mind for this subject, which all have a slight supernatural element running through them, apart from The Village, that was more a psychological one pretending to have supernatural entities causing havoc.

Candyman (1992), The Blair Witch Project (1999), IT (1990), Jeepers Creepers (2001), Urban Legends (1998), The Village (2004), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

But we are led to believe that it’s the imagination that adds the supernatural elements and make them more than they are. However, that doesn’t seem to tally with what we see or know. Although people’s attention can be caught by sensationalism, mostly people prefer the reasonable and more ordinary answer. Often not willing to accept even the idea of an extra dimension of darkness, because it’s safer for the mind I suspect. So, I wonder how it is that such stories of demons, ghosts, witchcraft, vampires, rituals, entities and such made it into the mainstream. Just though fiction? Or is it that fiction is the only way to cross that border of ideas, comprehension, and understanding. To make people consider the extreme of it being real, so as to plant the seeds of warning.

And why would we need those warnings? Are movies and stories just a modern version of those old fairy tales, updated for the times but still there to pass it on. As well as desensitising some people, it alerts others, to the strange and dark that mostly likes to stay hidden and be among us, like the day walker, just blending in. So, myths and legends do something more than just entertain or keep the past alive. They are a cautionary tale often with threads of truth running through them, trying to reveal themselves. All we can do is pay attention as you don’t know if it is just fiction after all…

A Short Walk – one of my short stories, if you like that sort of thing.

(c) K Wicks