ShrimpShady
The One With the Wurlitzer
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
- Messages
- 543
- Points
- 133
By virtue of living in a civilized society, we are fated to encounter weird bullshit. Said bullshit may come in the form of a person, an animal, a group, event, or some other form of bullshit. Sometimes we are only second-hand or third-hand witnesses to the bullshit, with no way of verifying its core veracity. Maybe we know a little bit of the story, with the rest filled out by the stupid fucking neighborhood nuisance who looks exactly like his older sister despite being of a different sex, and is also an annoying piece of shit you can't beat up because he's younger than you.
These incomplete narratives often become elevated the more we speak of them, resulting in an inside joke of a more complex kind: the urban legend.
Every community has urban legends, mostly because we're all bored fucks who can't mind our own goddamn business.
This thread is for the diverse community over at the Scribblehub Forums Dot Com to share their local urban legends. And I mean local urban legends. None of that Skinwalker Ranch, Roswell UFO shit. I hope to hear about some real messed up sickos near and dear to your hearts.
As is customary, I'll start with an urban legend of my own. Be warned, it's not very exciting or creepy. Just kinda... sad.
For most of my life, I've lived in a sort of housing complex built specifically for university lecturers and their families. Being a lecturer is a pretty cushy job here most of the time, so you get nicer looking, though not pretentious, homes. That's the case for my stretch of street as well... except for a single house which was unlike anything else. Flanked on both sides by two-floored family homes was this plot of overgrown land with almost nothing but a little shack. How little? Well, actual Shaq would probably bring the whole place down if he accidentally hit his head on the door frame.
And in that little home lived an older man who was almost always shirtless and who was a paragon of stiff joints. No one really knew his business, but he used to spend his time tossing rice and singing hallelujah. When I was a young, I'd often play near his property with the other neighborhood brats. We'd pick some of the weeds growing around his plot of land and pretend we were cooking them. Yeah, maybe we trespassed a little bit. Can you blame us? We didn't have internet, we didn't know what laws there were.
Regardless, even though we spent so much time playing around the man's house, we never figured out what his deal was. The grownups never told us either. That allowed for increasingly fantastical stories to bubble up between us. The prevailing theory was that he was simply a pious man of God who gave up his every worldly possession to the church. I believed it, of course, as I couldn't see anyone voluntarily living in such a condition. He didn't even have a toilet, I believed, as every once in a while, he'd head out from his little shack with a bucket supposedly full of waste to dispose of God knows where. The grownups had choice words to say to him about that, but I don't remember if anything came out of it. He'd sometimes leave fully clothed as well, during the evenings, with a shiny little hat on. That made me think he was part of some secret society.
For the longest time, I thought this man was only known to my little stretch of street, until a kid from the other side of the neighborhood came over and told me that the man ate kids. As an aside, kid killers were a particularly popular scare tactic used by parents where I'm from. Every kid believed that there were just some sickos out there who'd abduct them and cut their heads off. Anyway, the accusation that kid made had pissed me off for some reason, despite my only relationship to this mysterious man being trespassing and hearing him sing hallelujah throughout the night. I think since then, it became more unpleasant for me to speculate about the man's life. It might've also been the fact that I'd grown older and the neighborhood kids stopped playing together.
His singing would come to an abrupt end one day when I was in highschool, when they found him dead in his little shack. It made me remember another thing I'd heard, though I didn't know the truth of, that he was left by his family, either in death or separation. I don't remember who found him, but it couldn't have been a swift discovery, as even the adults kept their distance from the man. From then on, the streets were quieter, but sometimes I think I'd still hear the sound of tossing rice grains and songs of worship if I strained my ears at night.
These incomplete narratives often become elevated the more we speak of them, resulting in an inside joke of a more complex kind: the urban legend.
Every community has urban legends, mostly because we're all bored fucks who can't mind our own goddamn business.
This thread is for the diverse community over at the Scribblehub Forums Dot Com to share their local urban legends. And I mean local urban legends. None of that Skinwalker Ranch, Roswell UFO shit. I hope to hear about some real messed up sickos near and dear to your hearts.
As is customary, I'll start with an urban legend of my own. Be warned, it's not very exciting or creepy. Just kinda... sad.
For most of my life, I've lived in a sort of housing complex built specifically for university lecturers and their families. Being a lecturer is a pretty cushy job here most of the time, so you get nicer looking, though not pretentious, homes. That's the case for my stretch of street as well... except for a single house which was unlike anything else. Flanked on both sides by two-floored family homes was this plot of overgrown land with almost nothing but a little shack. How little? Well, actual Shaq would probably bring the whole place down if he accidentally hit his head on the door frame.
And in that little home lived an older man who was almost always shirtless and who was a paragon of stiff joints. No one really knew his business, but he used to spend his time tossing rice and singing hallelujah. When I was a young, I'd often play near his property with the other neighborhood brats. We'd pick some of the weeds growing around his plot of land and pretend we were cooking them. Yeah, maybe we trespassed a little bit. Can you blame us? We didn't have internet, we didn't know what laws there were.
Regardless, even though we spent so much time playing around the man's house, we never figured out what his deal was. The grownups never told us either. That allowed for increasingly fantastical stories to bubble up between us. The prevailing theory was that he was simply a pious man of God who gave up his every worldly possession to the church. I believed it, of course, as I couldn't see anyone voluntarily living in such a condition. He didn't even have a toilet, I believed, as every once in a while, he'd head out from his little shack with a bucket supposedly full of waste to dispose of God knows where. The grownups had choice words to say to him about that, but I don't remember if anything came out of it. He'd sometimes leave fully clothed as well, during the evenings, with a shiny little hat on. That made me think he was part of some secret society.
For the longest time, I thought this man was only known to my little stretch of street, until a kid from the other side of the neighborhood came over and told me that the man ate kids. As an aside, kid killers were a particularly popular scare tactic used by parents where I'm from. Every kid believed that there were just some sickos out there who'd abduct them and cut their heads off. Anyway, the accusation that kid made had pissed me off for some reason, despite my only relationship to this mysterious man being trespassing and hearing him sing hallelujah throughout the night. I think since then, it became more unpleasant for me to speculate about the man's life. It might've also been the fact that I'd grown older and the neighborhood kids stopped playing together.
His singing would come to an abrupt end one day when I was in highschool, when they found him dead in his little shack. It made me remember another thing I'd heard, though I didn't know the truth of, that he was left by his family, either in death or separation. I don't remember who found him, but it couldn't have been a swift discovery, as even the adults kept their distance from the man. From then on, the streets were quieter, but sometimes I think I'd still hear the sound of tossing rice grains and songs of worship if I strained my ears at night.
