Aaron Mahnke

Oh, and we mustn't forget the smell, either.

It's said that Bandage Man leaves the stench of rotting flesh in his wake, clinging to any lingering scraps of gauze.

Which sounds lovely, right?

And I always love a cautionary folktale.

The kind of story designed to keep children from straying into the woods, or teenagers from making out in secret parking lots.

And what kills the mood more than the perfume of rotting meat dripping from a mangled corpse, am I right?

And yet, fictional as it may seem, it never hurts to be wary.

If you find yourself driving down that long stretch of Highway 101 near Cannon Beach in Oregon, you might just want to keep an eye on your rearview mirror.

And a can of mummy-proof spray.

In the glove box.

Sometimes folklore works like an opposite version of the telephone game.

Rather than a true message being broken down and warped into fiction by repeating it over and over again, sometimes fiction can be passed along for so long that it feels exactly like the truth.

It's a process that has happened countless times in the past, and in this digital age, I doubt it's going to stop.

Urban legends, though, are almost always a reflection of the fears of the time.

Of course, that doesn't mean people were once quite literally worried about a mummy coming into their suburb.

It is, as it always has been, a bit more nuanced than that.

Bandaged lumberjacks shuffled onto the scene of a small logging town when the newest generation wanted to look further afield for employment.

Phantom buses showed up at a time when technology was developing too quickly to keep up.

And Bunnymen?

Well, there's no real explanation for that one.