Where do urban legends come from
This is a question I often get asked via email – and it’s a difficult one to answer comprehensively. In fact, it’s a question that can be approached in two different ways. How did Urban Legends develop? No one knows who first used the phrase ‘Urban Legend’ to represent the remarkable tales described above. However, Urban Legends have been studied as a serious form of folklore for more than 40 years. Scholars such as Jan Harold Brunvand and Gary Alan Fine – among many others -- have done much to delve into this sub-type of folklore in search of its meaning and mode in our communities. Urban Legends almost certainly developed out of the informal oral communication traditions that have been a part of every culture since the beginning of our history.
Urban Legends, in a sense, have been with us ever since we began telling stories. It’s hard to imagine that humanity developed the process of telling remarkable, unsubstantiated stories as true events only recently. However, as a defined tradition, distinct from other types of folklore, Urban Legends probably emerged at the turn of the 20th Century (or thereabouts). I believe that Urban Legends developed at a time when the increasingly rational world had come to reject stories of what we now consider to be truly fanciful things – dragons, witches, demons and the like – as a part of everyday knowledge. It seems reasonable to believe that a ‘new’ type of tale developed to fill the gap in our need to communicate extraordinary stories – a tale in which the facts are strange, the events incredible, but the details of which nonetheless seem possible and therefore believable, if only due to our lack of specific knowledge.