Hello again, and welcome back to Lulu's Happy Hour. As you can probably tell from the background music, this is going to be a very different episode. I'm doing this episode purely out of personal interest.
Since I was a litter girl, I have always been interested in horror and mysterious stories. I had read and watched pretty much everything I could find, and I had been collecting stories from all around the world.
So on this lazy Sunday night, when you are all cozy and snuggled up in your comfortable bed, allow me to share with you some of the most popular scary stories in modern day living. The key word of the day is going to be URBAN LEGENDS. For those you who are easily scared, maybe you should stop here, and the rest of you let me take you into the world of Urban Legends.
First of all, let us take a closer look at the term "Urban Legends." An Urban Legend, Urban Myth or Urban Tell is a form of Modern Folklore. We have talked about folklore before. An urban legend is a form of modern-day folklore. It usually consists of fictional stories often presented as true with scary or bizarre elements.
So these are the stories that are usually scary or just simply strange, rooted in local popular culture. These legends can be used for entertainment purposes, and they are spread by any media including newspaper, email and of course social media. Usually urban legends start with "this is a true story that happened to a friend of friend." In this way you feel that it is something that could have happened and could be true and a lot of people do believe that these stories really happened.
Urban legends are especially popular in the United States, in Japan and in some parts of Europe. Even in China, we have our own version of urban legends, usually scary and usually strange. Even though a lot of people are skeptical about whether they truly happened or not, many others believe that these are true stories. So in today's episode, I am going to share with you four of the most popular and terrifying urban legends in the English speaking world.
We start with story No.4. A hugely popular urban legend called "killer in the backseat." The story goes like this. One night, a woman went out for drinks with her friends. She left the bar fairly late at night, got in her car, and onto the deserted highway.
After a few minutes, she noticed a car in her rearview mirror, approaching at a pace just slightly quicker than hers. This car behind her flashed its lights and then pulled up dangerously close to her car and the lights flashed again. She was getting nervous about the car behind. She was trying to speed up, yet through every stop light and turn, it followed her until she arrived at her house. She was terrified and she figured her only hope was to run into the house and call the police.
As she flew from the car, so did the driver of the car arrive behind her and she screamed, "lock the door and call the police, call 911." When the police arrived, the woman finally find out the horrible truth. The man in the car behind her have been trying to save her because as he pulled up behind her, he saw the shadow of the man with a knife rising up from the backseat of her car to stab her. So he flashed his lights and tried to warn her.
The basic bottom line of the story is the hidden fear. Usually we feel safe locked in our car because we think the danger always lies outside, as long as you are inside you are safe. But in this case, the victim was actually locking herself in with the danger.
Speaking of feeling unsafe in a place where you should feel safe, this brings us to Story No.3: the call is from inside the house. You can see frequent references to this story in many English-Speaking TV shows and films, and this is the story.

A teenage girl is babysitting at night, so she is taking care of someone else's children. The children have been put to bed upstairs and the babysitter is downstairs watching TV. Suddenly the phone rings, a man with a creby voice says on the phone: "Why don't you check on the children?"
The babysitter thinks it is just someone making a really nasty joke. She goes back to watching TV and the stranger calls back several times: "Why don't you check on the children?" Eventually the girl becomes worried and calls the police. The police tell her they will trace the next call and find out where it is coming from.
After he calls again, the police call back, telling her she should get out of the house because the call is coming from inside the house. Later on the police explained that the calls were come from inside the house, and that the man was calling her after he killed the children.
Moving on, from two scary stories, to a scary ritual. No.2 on today's list is Bloody Mary. There are so many different versions, but usually the legends has it that if you turn off the lights in your house late at night, stand in front of the mirror in your bathroom sometimes with a candle and chant: Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, three times, a girl covered in blood will appear in the mirror.
Based on the different variations of the story, she will scream at you, scare you or even kill you. This is a tale that makes the audience fear their own reflection. In English people say curiosity kills the cat. So there are still daring youngsters young people trying out the ritual, and there are always stories about people getting killed or people dying mysterious death, because they have tried the ritual.
There is something inherently scary about the idea of something coming out of the mirror or television screen, like it is some parallel world, or perhaps a world that is the opposite to ours, as in the film The Ring (午夜凶铃). But the other meaning of BLOODY MARY is actually a cock-tail.
Finally we comes to the last end of the top story of today. This story redefines the idea of Urban Legends. It's really recent and originated on the Internet. This is the story of the Slender Man. Unlike your super heroes, your Spiderman, your batman, the slender man is coming straight from your nightmares.
"Slender" means "thin" in English. Unlike other stories, this is the story that actually started on the Internet. Originally this was a fictional supernatural character in a 2009 Something Awful Photoshop Competition. Someone online created this character and ask people to photoshop him into different pictures.
The slender man is a thin unnaturally tall man, roughly between 2 and 3 meters with a featureless head and face. Essentially, he has no face; he is always wearing a black suit. Stories of the slender man commonly feature him stacking, abducting or traumatizing people, particularly children. He is always lurking in the woods or around your house. When he gets a chance, he is going to come and get you.
Even though it started as a Fictional character, as people started photoshopping him into different pictures, more and more people started to believe that he is real. In this new urban legend there is an idea call "creepypaster." It is very difficult to translate into Chinese. The reason why it is called PASTER, this word is based on the word paste, copy and paste because it gets so popular, so it gets copied and pasted on different social media.
That's all of our URBAN LEGENDS today, I hope you enjoyed listening to these stories as much as I enjoyed telling them and hope these stories won't give you nightmares tonight. If you are a fellow fan of urban legends or horror stories, feel free to leave your comments and share your stories or drop me a line so we can discuss further. Good night, sleep tight and don't let the monsters bite. I will see you next time. Bye!

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