Top 10 urban legends

From Bloody Mary to 'the spider bite', urban myths have inspired countless creepy books and films – here James Dawson shares his 10 favourites and explores their roots and influence. Ghost-less ghost stories, urban legends are modern day fairytales. Just as Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks were spread by oral tradition, urban myths are spread by word of mouth, creating contemporary folklore, often with a moral sting in the tail. Let's face it, a sleepover isn't complete without at least one candlelit tale of terror. Much like traditional folklore, modern myths are embellished or altered as they are retold. Most are still told orally over marshmallows and hot chocolate but some are recorded. Many authors have retooled urban legends as inspiration for novels or movies. My new novel, Say Her Name is my version of the most famous urban legend of them all, the "Bloody Mary" curse. I'm far from alone, however. Here I present 10 of the scariest urban legends and examine their roots and influence.

1. Bloody Mary

Perhaps the most famous modern myth, this tale suggests that if you are to look in the mirror and say "Bloody Mary" a specified number of times, something will happen. It's the what that legend disagrees on. In the earliest versions, an unmarried woman would see the face of her future husband in the glass or a skull if she were destined to die before being wed. This evolved into something more gory – groups invoking a bleeding spirit or witch called Mary. Some links have also been made to Queen Mary I as she suffered multiple miscarriages during her reign.
The story has been hugely influential. Mirrors and reflections, a regular fixture in uncanny literature play parts in Clive Barker's The Forbidden, which went on to be the film Candyman, while Ringu, by Koji Suzuki, substitutes a mirror for a television set. The X Files and Supernatural directly tackled the Mary myth on screen. This year sees not one but two novels retelling versions of the legend: my own Say Her Name and an American version, The Summoning.

2. The spider bite

Possibly one of the more "believed" urban myths, this one tells the tale of a young person, often a traveller to a far-flung location, who is bitten by a spider and/or an ant. On returning home, the victim experiences a "hatching" whereby parasitic baby spiders and/or ants burst out from under their skin. FYI – this isn't physically possible, but it hasn't stopped parasitology being a defining feature of the body horror genre from Alien and Wrath of Kahn to Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and Stephenie Meyer's The Host.

3. The hookman

Another campfire must, this tale features an amorous young couple out for a drive when the radio informs them a hook-handed lunatic has escaped from a local institution. Either the couple go home to find a hook embedded in the back of the car or one of them ends up suspended above the car with his fingers scraping against the roof. In the original, novelised version of I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan, the killer uses a gun but the cinematic version by Kevin Williamson features a hook-handed fishermen hell-bent on revenge. The Candyman also has a hook for a hand.

4. Freaky food

Recently, outraged internet people were taken in by claims that popular fast food outlet KFC were breeding genetically mutated chickens for their burgers. While the "shock pictures" were quickly revealed to be fakes, more than one of my Facebook friends were taken in. Foodstuffs often fall victim to urban myths – are MacDonald's burgers really made from earthworms? Will mixing popping candy and fizzy pop make you explode? Don't forget the perennial "dog meat takeaway" rumour. Food is at the centre of our lives so it's no surprise it's at the heart of our fiction. The Hunger Games presents kids willing to kill for a lifetime of food while Soylent Green (based on the 1966 novel Make Room, Make Room) goes one further and suggests we'll soon be eating people, much like in Matt Whyman's The Savages.

5. The licked hand

In this popular tale, a scared girl (or sometimes an old woman) listens to an ominous dripping coming from within her home. She is reassured by the presence of her faithful dog who licks her hand from under the bed. Eventually, she investigates the noise only to find her dog slaughtered and a message written in blood – "humans can lick hands too". This story was actually taken from a much earlier MR James story called 'The Diary of Mr Poynter' in which a character experiences a similar fate.

6. The kidney heist

In this tale, a young man is either seduced by a beautiful woman or pays for an escort. The following morning, he awakens in a bathtub full of ice to find one of his kidneys has been removed for sale on the black market. The moral couldn't be clearer, really, could it? Organ harvesting is a staple of horror fiction from Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go to Neal Shusterman's excellent Unwind.

7. Location, location, location

As someone eager to get on the property ladder, I don't know how bothered I'd be to check what my house was built on, but you might want to get a surveyor to have a look. Everyone knows houses built on burial grounds are bound to be cursed, right? Although ancient Indian Burial mounds are few and far between in the USA, they sure get a lot of flack. From Stephen King's The Shining and Pet Cemetery to Hollywood classic Poltergeist and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the message is very clear – don't just look at a home before you buy it, look under it.

8. Chain letters

You know this one. You get sent a communiqué that suggests if you don't pass it on to five more people there'll be some terrible consequence. This urban legend seems to have predicted viral marketing by twenty years or so. The concept of the deadly chain letter was best explored in Christopher Pike's Chain Letter, but the idea of cursed texts is also explored in Scarlet Thomas's The End of Mr Y and also Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

9. The call is coming from inside the house

The moral is clear: WOMEN, PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN. Variations of this one see a babysitter being tormented by threatening phone calls that turn out to be coming from a inside the house. The children in her care are often murdered. Variations of this story are everywhere, notably in Point Horrors The Babysitter by RL Stine and Mother's Helper by A Bates. Kevin Williamson paid homage in the Scream series as did I in Hollow Pike. With advances in mobile phone technology expect this to develop into Snapchat based horror or killers using Tinder to track down their victims.

10. The Slender Man

A truly modern modern myth, Slender Man started online as part of a competition to Photoshop pictures to include a supernatural element. User 'Victor Surge' added a suited, faceless, unnaturally tall figure into two black and white photos which were copied and distributed virally over the net. Since then, millions of authors, mostly online, have shared and spread the story on websites such as Creepypasta. The Slender Man's MO is to abduct people, often children who seem to willingly go with the figure never to be seen again, making him a terrifying version of the Pied Piper.