re: Urban legends from your youth

Aids needles in movie seats.

Bloody Mary

It wasn't the urban legends that scared me

It was the REAL monsters


Not the movie monsters mind you, but the personal ones. The ones that lurked in your woods or haunted your neighborhoods.

The things that bumped ever so palpably in your nights?
Here's mine.



We called him Mr. Hungry. In the very back of the woods where on my grandparents property there was a thicket. Deep and dark and overgrown, with heavy woods all around, too thick to venture in to. Always dark, so clustered and shaded that you couldn't see far into it at much at all.
That was where Mr. Hungry lived.

We'd bring all the carcasses there. Rabbits, squirrels, fish, anything that bled. It was always the kids job to bring the entrails there, a long walk through a wooded corridor, back to the thicket...the thicket where Mr. Hungry dwelt, always watching, and always, always hungry.

That trek, eerily quiet when you reached it, it seemed. Like the birds would quit chirping there, and all you would hear is the wind...the wind, and the faintest whisper of utter silence, and that feeling of hidden eyes crawling over your skin.

So many times we'd bring the bloodstained bucket of steaming guts and skin and fur and bones and heads.
You'd walk slow there, eyes darting to and fro, watching for movement in the woods. And sometimes, sometimes you'd swear you'd see catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, some darting shadow moving swift just outside of your field of vision, and always when you'd turn towards it...nothing. Nothing but the feeling that you were not alone.

It was always better to feed Mr. Hungry with someone else. A sibling, a friend, a cousin. It made the walk easier, and the mad dash for home right after you threw the foul mix into the thicket a breathless race, almost fun.
But sometimes, you had to go alone. Alone to that place where there were never any bones or skulls left from previous visits..And you would swear, when the wind died, that you could hear the faintest whisper of heavy breath. Heavy, hot, and always so very, very, hungry.

But we made damn sure that there was something to bring when we visited, because if he didn't get fed...well, he might start looking. And maybe he'd leave that foul place where the brambles grew close as kin and ground was always wet, and if he did, he might be hungry for something...fresher.