Urban Legends & Modern Myths

Reviewed By: Terry Ramirez

REVIEW

I chose Urban Legends and Modern Myths because I have not really been exposed to very many of these urban legends. This website was full of weird and creepy stories. This site offered links to a variety of urban legend genre, including amazing accidents, corpses and cadavers, creepy tales, children and babies, escaped lunatics and one called The Ugly Truth. Once I started reading the legends, it was hard to stop. I followed link after link, frankly feeling more than a little disgusted with the majority of these stories. In particular, I found the stories about children and babies very disturbing. The site offered the following definition for an urban myth: “…a short tale that is told and retold as true, although it usually has little or no basis in reality or can’t be confirmed one way or another.” Urban legends are usually presented as something that happened to the friend of a friend of a friend. According to the website, the stories in The Ugly Truth section were true. It would be very difficult to find that this site was accurate. The stories did not have apparent spelling or grammatical errors, but the stories are urban legend. They are not true anyway. This site is sponsored by Warped Images Unlimited. I have never heard of the sponsor, so I am unsure whether this is a reputable sponsor. There was a link to a home page entitled, “Warphead’s Weird World. The page was not signed. There is no way to assess whether or not the author is an expert. I felt that this site was fairly objective. The definition of urban legends tells the visitor that the stories aren’t true. Thus, bias was avoided. This site did not have the pop-up ads that many of the other urban legend sites had. That made it a much more pleasant site than the others that I visited. The website was very current with a copyright date of 2003.