A while ago I had one of those parenting milestones I look forward to: my six year old son came home and told me about Bloody Mary. Being an aficionado of the urban legend genre, I had to correct several point of course, including the fact that it was all bull$#!*. Still it got me thinking: a couple of years ago, my daughter came to me with a story from a kid at school (this was maybe third grade) about the woods that sit between four of the schools in this town.
The story? Someone saw a monster in the woods. Maybe two.
What a waste.
So being a responsible parent, I used this opportunity to explain the nature of urban legends to my daughter, and in doing so told her what's really in those woods:
See, this is an old town. It was founded in the 1800s. And old towns, they tend to have a history, and not all of it is pretty. Well, around the turn of the 20th century, a handful of local kids disappeared. Not all at once. Every few weeks, a kid would turn up missing. No one had any idea what was happening, but needless to say people were pretty freaked out about the whole thing.
Eventually, a kid comes home and says that an old guy who lived in town had asked him to help find his dog. The guy says his dog took off after something in the woods, a squirrel or whatever. The kid follows the guy out into the woods looking for this dog, and after he gets about 20 or 30 feet into the woods, the guy's wife jumps out from behind a tree and tries to grab him. The kid managed to get loose and ran right home.
Well, people being the level headed group that they are, the parents immediately start telling everyone what happened, and before long you've got a full fledged angry mob. They trot out to the woods, break down the door of the cabin where the old couple live, and find the old woman. A quick search of the place find some of the clothes from the missing kids, and that's enough. Cabin burns, and the old lady gets hung from a tree.
The husband, seeing the burning cabin, turns himself in. He admits to taking the kids, but says he doesn't know what happened to them. His wife took them away or some such nonsense. He still gets tried for murder, and soon dies in prison.
Anyway, this was a long time ago, right? The thing is, that cabin? It was right in the middle of those woods behind the schools. And a couple of years ago during recess, two boys were approached by an old man asking for help with a lost dog. One of the kids, presumably the one who wasn't an idiot, says that his mom told him not to help people like that, but the other kid wants to find the dog. The first kid, feeling like something's not right, starts back to the school to get a teacher or something, but when he turns back, he notices that behind the old guy, there's this lady in the trees, and she's looking right at him.
And she's swaying in the breeze.
Well the kid freaks and runs to the school at that point, but by the time he got back with the teacher, there was no one there. No old guy. No lady. And no kid.
And no one ever figured out what happened to him.
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