Urban Legends and Why They Scare Us by Mark W. Curran Urban legends are the modern equivalent of early folklore. They are stories with a modern setting passed down from generation to generation, originally told around a campfire and evolve to fit the tone and time of their telling. I'd always been fascinated by these local myths. In the Philadelphia suburban neighborhood where I grew up, kids told the stories of vanishing hitchhikers and hook-handed asylum escapees; the line