What Are Good Legends / Folks

Need to Make Up An Urban Legend/Folk Story: Any Ideas?

"A lie is always more believable if it's wearing a jacket made of truth"

In other words, find something real which can be the starting point for your urban legend - Something which happened years ago and was reported in the newspapers, so if people hear your story and decide to check it out, they'll find a factual event.

Then you need to think of something which you can link to that event as the basis of your urban legend. For example, if there was a fire or a bus crash and people died, your urban legend could be some kind of ghostly happening at the spot.

Then throw in a couple of fictional witnesses to whatever your urban legend is. Make sure that they are from years ago (the 1970s or 80s, if not before) and that they only saw bits of whatever you say the urban legend is. "Marvin Englestrom, a local resident, recalled that during his boyhood in the 1950s, he'd sometimes see shadowy figures moving around inside the locked cemetery gates"

The classic example of this kind of thing is the Vicar of Ratcliffe Cross. This was a tale about the ghost of an 18th century priest who haunted the derelict docks of London in the 1970s. In life, he'd been an evil man, murdering sailors for their wages and that kind of thing. When the story came out in the papers, a lot of people came forward to say that they'd seen him or knew the story. One senior Police officer claimed that, as a young constable, he was always afraid to patrol the riverside streets in case he ran into the spectral clergyman. In reality, there was no ghost. It was made up by the journalist in 1972 just to see people's reactions. There was no evil vicar known in that area.

The journalist took an area which was pretty creepy and derelict, and also known for some really nasty murders back in the 1800s (well before Jack the Ripper). He created a plausible story to suit the area, but in this case let the 'fictional witnesses' create their own accounts!

What are folk tales?

Folktale: A story or legend forming part of an oral tradition.

Folktale, a story passed on by word of mouth rather than by writing, and thus partly modified by successive re‐tellings before being written down or recorded. The category includes legends, fables, jokes, tall stories, and fairy tales or Märchen. Many folktales involve mythical creatures and magical transformations.

This term can be used either broadly or narrowly. In the broad sense it applies to all prose narratives following traditional storylines, which are told orally, or were so told in previous generations. It thus covers fairytales, legends of all types, memorates, fables, tall tales, and humorous anecdotes. The original author is always unknown; in the rare cases where an individual who shaped the current version has been identified, the tellers are unaware of this (e.g. The Three Bears). Most tales seem to have been formed by recombining traditional elements (‘motifs’) and/ or transferring an established plot (‘tale-type’) from one hero, or one location, to another.
The narrow definition restricts itself to the avowedly fictional narratives in the above list, excluding legends and memorates, since these claim to be true. From an English point of view, this is regrettable, since legends make up a very high proportion of our corpus of traditional narratives and still circulate vigorously, while memorates are a major source for the study of current beliefs.
The basic catalogue of folktales in the narrow sense is The Types of the Folktale by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (1961); see also Stith Thompson's The Folktale (1977). Its system was applied to British material in Baughman, 1966; it is used in the works of Katharine Briggs and other recent British folklorists.