Urban legends have been handed down around campfires for generations. Most originated as a warning against perceived risks, some are now nothing more than just entertainment. One thing is for sure, urban legends can chill you down to your core. So here are some stories that happened to a “friend of a friend of ours.” In honor of Easter, we will start with the Bunny from Virginia.

The Bunny Man

In 1904, a local mental asylum was shut down due to public outrage – nobody wanted to live near the asylum, and this damaged the reputation of the nearby area and hurt the local economy. The government made arrangements to have the patients in the asylum transferred, but the transfer bus crashed, and some of the inmates managed to escape into the forest, while others died at the scene. As the authorities acted quickly, tracking down all of the escaped patients except for two – Marcus Lawster, and Douglas Griffen. As the search continued, the locals who lived in the area began to find the carcasses of rabbits on the ground and hanging from trees. These rabbits were skinned, and some of them seemed to have been partially consumed by whoever killed them. The authorities eventually tracked down Marcus Lawster – or what was left of him. The corpse of Lawster was found in a similar condition to the rabbits – hanging from a tree at the entrance of a tunnel under a bridge. The police eventually did track down the killer, but he was hit by an oncoming train as he tried to escape the authorities. The killer was the other missing inmate – Douglas Griffen – and it was eventually revealed that he had been committed to the mental asylum because he had killed his own wife and children on Easter Sunday. The bridge was nicknamed The Bunny Man Bridge by locals, and the name persists today.

A new spin on the “Babysitter and the man upstairs”

A girl in her teens is babysitting for a family in Newport Beach, Ca. The family is wealthy and has a very large house — you know the sort, with a ridiculous amount of rooms. Anyways, the parents are going out for a late dinner/movie. The father tells the babysitter that once the children are in bed she should go into this specific room (he doesn’t really want her wandering around the house) and watch TV there. The parents take off, and soon she gets the kids into bed and goes to the room to watch TV. She tries watching TV, but she is disturbed by a clown statue in the corner of the room. She tries to ignore it for as long as possible, but it starts freaking her out so much that she can’t handle it. She resorts to calling the father and asks, “Hey, the kids are in bed, but is it okay if I switch rooms? This clown statue is really creeping me out.” The father says, seriously, “Get the kids, go next door and call 911.” She asks, “What’s going on?” He responds, “Just go next door and once you call the police, call me back.” She gets the kids, goes next door, and calls the police. When the police are on the way, she calls the father back and asks, “So, really, what’s going on?” He responds, “We don’t have a clown statue.” He then further explains that the children have been complaining about a clown watching them as they sleep. He and his wife had just blown it off, assuming that they were having nightmares. The police arrive and apprehend the “clown,” who turns out to be a midget. A midget clown! I guess he was some homeless person dressed as a clown, who somehow got into the house and had been living there for several weeks. He would come into the kids’ rooms at nights and watch them while they slept. As the house was so large, he was able to avoid detection, surviving off their food, etc. He had been in the TV room right before the babysitter right came in there. When she entered he didn’t have enough time to hide, so he just froze in place and pretended to be a statue.

The slit-mouthed girl

It is said that there was once a stunningly beautiful woman who was married to a Samurai. The samurai believed her to be adulterous, and in his rage, he slit her mouth open from ear to ear and taunted by saying ‘Now who’s going to think you’re beautiful?’ This urban myth was first recorded in 1979 in Japan in Nagasaki, and it caused such uproar that police were forced to increase their presence and schools instructed their students to travel in groups. Apparently, the slit mouth woman, known in Japanese as Kuchisake-onna, lurks on the streets in Japan wearing a surgical mask. If you have the bad luck of coming into contact with her, she will ask you a question – ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’ If you answer ‘Yes’, she’ll rip off her mask and scream ‘What about NOW?’. If you answer the second time, ‘No’, the legend suggests that you will die a grisly death at the hand of the woman and her oversized pair of scissors. The scariest part is, even if you answer ‘Yes’ the second time, so warped is her mind that she will still slit your mouth open so that you can be just as ‘pretty’ as she is. You can’t just run away either – if you try to escape, every time you turn around still be standing there. Right in front of you. She is said to almost exclusively hunt children, and reports of sightings have occurred not only in Japan – she was sighted once again in South Korea as recently as 2004 wearing a red mask and following children. If you’re unfortunate enough to run into her on the way home, you should answer the questions noncommittally – ‘You look alright’, or ‘I think you’re average’ – this kind of answer is said to confuse her, giving you time to get the hell out of there.

Don’t turn on the lights

I heard about a girl who went back to her dorm room late one night to get her books before heading to her boyfriend’s room for the night. She entered but did not turn on the light, knowing that her roommate was sleeping. She stumbled around the room in the dark for several minutes, gathering books, clothes, toothbrush, etc. before finally leaving. The next day, she came back to her room to find it surrounded by police. They asked if she lived there and she said yes. They took her into her room, and there, written in blood on the wall, were the words, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?” Her roommate was being murdered while she was getting her things.