As Halloween day I'd like to talk about ghost stories, or rather say, something a bit more scary as could be “an Urban legend”. But First of all, I have to tell you about what a urban legend is..
The traditional “urban legend” is a kind of modern short story which most people have heard as true stories of real-life experiences, like the typical “Yuurei” stories we know in Japan.
A good example of the urban legends is a story about a car and death, commonly called “the Death Car story”. This death car is, as its name suggests, a story about a car associated with a dead person; that is a ghost. In these stories the car is very significant. Here is one example.
One day a man from Los Angeles breathlessly told his friend that he could pick up a $5,400 Porsche sports car for only $500. According to him, the reason for the reduced price was that it had been parked in the middle of the Desert for one week with a dead man in it; consequently, the smell of death could not be removed from it.
Now, if you want your friend get really scarred, tell him this story when he gets in your car (assuming that's the death car)and see how the color of his face turns pale.
This is the bare-bones story with these recurrent motifs: expensive car, low price, suicide or murder, corpse long undiscovered, and lingering smell of death.
The car is sometimes a Porsche, a Ford, a Toyota, or any other, and the price varies as well as the time in which the dead body was kept undiscovered.
At any rate this story about the death car is ubiquitous with many variations in detail. These stories are classified as “urban legends”. In short, an urban legend seems to be realistic, and in fact, people narrate it from generation to generation as a real story. But in their mind they think it isn’t true or.. is it..?Have a Happy Halloween Day!
