San Antonio College Library

What are the stories behind the compelling myths that have become our urban legends?

America's premiere folk detective is back on the case, sniffing out those zany but dubious stories that "really happened" to a friend of your sister's boyfriend's accountant's mechanic. Jan Harold Brunvand - "Mr. Urban Legend" (Smithsonian) - tracks the most fabulous tales making today's cocktail-party circuit and shows why those stories that sound too good to be true probably are too good to be true. The Baby Train offers a revealing peek behind...

Monsters, lunatics, vampires, werewolves, evil dolls, and suicide dogs, stones entombing bodies, faces appearing in walls, curses, and meetings with the devil--all this and more are contained within this book of Scottish urban legends.

Where do the urban legends, conspiracy theories, and old wives' tales we hear every day really originate? Jack explores the best, strangest, and funniest of the tales so many of us take for gospel, and uncovers some eye-popping true stories that are even more far-fetched than their mythical counterparts.

"Here he [the author] looks in detail at a dozen rampant and long-lived examples of this vigorous category of contemporary folklore, tracing their historyies, variations, sources, and meanings."--Jacket.

"Legend and Belief is a descriptive and analytical study of the legend, the most prolific and characteristic form of folklore in contemporary Western civilization. Not that the legend does not have ancient roots; like the tale, the joke, the ballad, the proverb, or mummery, it was part of an archaic, preindustrial tradition. But the legends - as old as conversation and debate about problems of the human condition - has been able to survive the technological...

It was a local story that horrified the nation: two 12-year-old girls lured a friend into the Waukesha woods, where they proceeded to stab her 19 times in an effort to appease a faceless mythical entity known online as "Slenderman." But there's more to the story than the dark headlines it generated. A sobering documentary that delves deep into the story behind this shocking crime, Beware the Slenderman examines how an Internet urban myth could take...

"Whispers on the Color Line focuses on a wide array of tales told in black and white communities across America. Topics run the gamut from alleged governmental conspiracies, possible food tampering, gang violence, and the sex lives of celebrities. Such beliefs travel by word of mouth, in print, and increasingly over the Internet. In many instances these rumors and legends reflect the tenaciousness of racial misunderstanding that continues to frustrate...