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People didn't begin talking about "urban legends" until the 1930's & 1940's yet it possible to identify a similar phenomenon stretching back thousands of years. In the most general terms, an urban legend, or myth, is any modern fictional story, told as truth, that reaches a wide audience by being passed from person to person. For modern society they are a form of folklore that has continued in the basic style from the time of Boddeccia, Socrates and Xio Ming, filling the role of the fairy tale and the parable. The key difference is that, unlike fairy stories, urban legends are intended to be taken as tales of real events, happening to real people in real locations. Even when some of the most famous versions of such fairy tales as "Cinderella" were first circulated back in the 1690's, the audience of the day didn't really believe the events depicted.

Urban legends, however, are much more firmly rooted in fact for a start. They are most often found in the "friend of a friend" version, linking the storyteller with the supposed victim and instantly installing a sense of reliability before further details appear. And details do play a major role; street names or the names of places, aspects of culture such as films or people, and current events, all of which are presumably verifiable, strengthen the audiences belief in the story. And, if 99.9% of the story is true, it is unlikely the remaining tenth of a percent will be questioned. The best place to hide a lie, it seems is between two truths.

But facts alone cannot turn a "what if" scenario into a certifiable urban legend. To do this, and to survive the relatively short attention span of a mass audience, a legend must reflect the current emotional climate. Many legends, therefore, develop as embodiments of basic human fears, providing a cautionary note or moral lesson, instructing society on how to protect itself from danger. And so, as fears change, so do the most circulated legends. In the 1950's, one of the most prominent legends was that of the "Hook-hand Killer", a tale of a young couple parked in a remote spot who narrowly avoid become the latest victims of a psychopath recently escaped from a nearby mental hospital. The message here is obvious, warning of the dangers of going off alone, of separating oneself from society, and, on another level, of engaging in premarital relations. When the story first appeared, the concept of parking' was a relatively new phenomenon in America, leaving hundreds of

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