True Campfire Stories and Urban Legends
These are the legends that are more than just folklore. These next several paragraphs will cast light upon the truth behind 5 chilling #campfire stories that we've all heard, but didn't realize their factual, sinister origins.
A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn't entirely fictional...
Wes #Craven film was inspired by true events that were taking place in the late 1970s. While no knife-glove-wielding pervert was actually taking the lives of sleeping teens, something was taking the lives of young, healthy men of Asian descent while while they slept.
The sleep-death phenomenon known as "Asian Death Syndrome" or "#Brugada syndrome" claimed the lives a few dozen people. Curiously, its victims were Hmong refugee males who had fled the #Cambodian Killing Fields for America, having survived the #Khmer massacre. While the syndrome is now medically detectable and preventable, there is still no explanation as to why it would have so ruthlessly affected this small group of people.
Craven spoke about one particular, spine-chilling incident involving a family and their young son that really galvanized his mission to create the film. “He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare.”
There was most certainly a Mad Bunny Man in Virginia...
Internet versions of the Bunny Man have carried the local legend to new heights, but they can’t discredit the core facts. Someone, around Halloween 1970, was attacking folks with a hatchet whilst dressed in a rabbit suit.
Air force Academy Cadet Robert Bennett reported to Fairfax County, #Virginia police that while he and his fiancée were parked on Guinea Road, a man dressed in a “white suit with long bunny ears" threw a hatchet through the car window and then disappeared into the night. The police had the hatchet but suspects. Two weeks later, a security guard spotted the lunatic taking an axe to a support beam of a newly constructed house on Guinea Road. When approached, the Bunny Man threatened to bust him on the head. Then guess what – he disappeared into the woods. There are twelve more reports just like these that take place over the span of a couple of weeks.
Candy Man, oh Candy Man, tell me your crimes...
One so horrible it must be true. The Candyman is a great movie, but the story was not simply pulled from the ether.
Twisted sadist Dean #Corll worked at the Houston Heights candy factory which his family owned and was known to give out candy to the neighborhood kids, but this monster was far from sweet.
Dean Corll raped, tortured and murdered at least 27 young men in the #Houston, Texas area between 1970 and 1973, the mass #murders making global headlines. With the help of two paid accomplices, Corll lured young men to his home in Pasadena, Texas, where kept them prisoner, torturing them before killing them.
Mexican #ritual murders were actually taking place in the 1980s...
One may be inclined to write stories of vacationing Americans falling prey to foreign cultists as Satanic Panic at its finest, but one may also be naïve.
Take for instance Adolfo Constanzo and his Palo #Mayombe-practicing followers in Mexico City. When the Cuban-American Adolfo moved from Miami to Mexico City, his animal sacrifices quickly escalated to human sacrifices. It was his belief that his sorcery was behind the success of the drug cartels that he had become affiliated with, and he needed to kill to make his spells more potent.
The abduction, and subsequent ritual killing, of American student Mark Kilroy during his spring break lit a fire under Mexican officials to investigate the local murders, leading the gruesome discovery that he had been sacrificed to Satan at Adolfo's murder compound - Rancho Santa Elena. Mark wasn't alone, as the cult had killed at least 20 others., maybe as many as 100.
It gets even weirder. A map drawn two years prior by confessed mass-killer Henry Lee Lucas had predicted with inexplicable accuracy that the bodies of victims of satanic rituals would be found right where Kilroy and the others were found.
No one has ever really been buried alive...right?
Wrong. Octavia Hatcher of #Pikeville, Kentucky was a young woman who married the richest man in town. They seemed to be happy, but even more so with the birth of their first, and only, child. Heartbreakingly, the baby only lived a few days.
Octavia became sick, seemingly from depression and took to bed, her health beginning to decline rapidly, and soon resulting in her apparent death. With no signs of life left in her, she was promptly buried. Shortly after, it was discovered that members of the community were succumbing to a coma-like illness from the bite of the #tsetse fly. Fearing the worst, Octavia's #grave was #exhumed, revealing that she had woken from her coma within the casket and had tried to claw her way out.