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Chapter 1: What were the unusual accusations against Procter & Gamble during the Satanic Panic?
They weren't the usual suspects. To be fair, there were a lot of weird targets during the height of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s. Most of them, in some way or another, resembled Eddie Munson from Stranger Things. These folks, though, did not fit that mold. The Fortune 100 company, Procter & Gamble. You see, they were accused of supporting Satanism. And it was all because of their logo.
It looked innocent enough. On one side, there was a crescent moon with a man's face. Think man and the moon, right?
Chapter 2: How did the panic surrounding Procter & Gamble's logo escalate?
On the other side, there were 13 stars. And to the average person, it honestly just looked like a stylized depiction of the night sky. But paranoid pearl-clutchers claimed that the image contained satanic imagery. The curls in the moon's hair, for example, were actually supposed to be subtle devil's horns.
And the stars, when connected like a constellation, could form the number 666, the mark of the beast. The company denied the claims, of course. They'd had that logo since 1851, and the 13 stars were meant to represent the 13 original colonies. But it was too late. The panic had fully set in, and no amount of reasoning would dissuade the true believers.
The company was forced to change their logo in the 1990s, and thankfully that seemed to do the trick.
Chapter 3: What is the story behind the ghost bus of Ladbroke Grove?
The rumors died down, and today Procter & Gamble is known less for their potential ties to the powers of hell and more for their monopoly over consumer goods. The lesson, though, is clear. It doesn't take much for a rumor to spiral out of control.
A sneaking suspicion, a scary story, even a little joke, all of them can be sucked into the cultural zeitgeist faster than you can say Mark of the Beast. So be careful what you believe, because you never know when a bit of fantasy could actually become an urban legend.
I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends.
Sailors, of course, have ghost ships. Road trippers have phantom semi-trucks charging at traffic before vanishing into thin air. There are even legends of spectral airplanes hovering out of time. And in 1934, London, England had the number seven bus. According to the popular story, it all started one dark night in June.
A young man was driving through Ladbroke Grove in the area of North Kensington. Perhaps he was coming home from a long day at work. I imagine he was tired and looking forward to getting back to rest his feet. It was late, and the roads were empty. But as he turned onto a dim intersection, the man's heart leapt into his throat. There, out of nowhere, appeared a bus.
Now, if you're imagining one of those classic red double-decker London buses, you would be right on the mark. And this one bore the number 7 on its side, along with the word General, which was odd, given that the London General Omnibus Company had folded a year prior, in 1933. Oh, and also, this bus happened to be charging right for him.
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Chapter 4: What led to the creation of the urban legend about the ghost bus?
The man swerved to avoid it, running off the road and smashed into the wall of a building. Just as he did, the bus vanished into thin air. Now, the story branches in two different directions from here. Some say that the man died on impact and that it was a pedestrian witness who ran to the police to report the strange encounter.
Others say that the man miraculously survived the crash, living to tell the tale himself. Either way, a legend was born. Ladbroke Grove had a ghost bus. Word spread like wildfire, and so did the sightings. In the summer of 1934, talk of the number seven was on everyone's lips. And the summer of 35, for that matter, and 36, and 37.
In the words of one modern witness, I saw this bus in November 1967. It was number seven and was parked halfway between the station and the bend at the other end. Two minutes past the bus, I joked, let's go a ride in the bus. We turned around, it was gone, disappeared. It was only 20 years later, visiting London from Canada, that I heard of this phantom bus on the radio.
It seems that the phantom bus of Ladbroke Grove had become a full-blown urban legend. Now, maybe it's a flaw of mine, but I just can't take a story at face value. I'm always hungry to dig deeper, especially when it comes to something like this, where so much hearsay is involved. So, my team dug a little deeper and found something pretty wild.
Because see, while it has all the markings of pure fiction, this story can actually be traced back to a real-life incident, and a real-life death.
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Chapter 5: How did the legend of the ghost bus evolve over the years?
It turns out that there was indeed a car accident in that spot on June 12th of 1934. The driver was a man named Ian James Stephen Beaton, a 25-year-old metallurgical engineer. But he wasn't the only driver involved. Beaton's car collided with another, driven by a chauffeur named George Pink. Pink was unscathed, but unfortunately, not so for poor Ian Beaton.
He died there, in the middle of the road. Just a few days later on June 15th, an inquest followed to determine whether or not Mr. Pink was guilty of vehicular manslaughter. Witnesses were called to the stand. One Mr. Frank Robinson was in the middle of describing the wet, slippery roads when he was interrupted and asked a rather strange question. What about the Phantom Bus?
And Mr. Robinson admitted that he did indeed know about the legend. In fact, everyone did. Contrary to most modern reports about the urban legend, rumors of the Ghost Bus didn't start with Beaton's death. Oh no, it had been whispered about for ages. And it seems either the defense or some sensationalizing journalists were trying to use this Phantom Bus rumor to get Mr. Pink off the hook.
After all, if there had been a ghost, well, the accident wouldn't have been George Pink's fault, now would it? In a July 1934 newspaper article, one local resident described the legend in detail. "'It's been going on strong for years,' she said.
"'I have never met anybody who has seen the bus, but the version I heard was that on certain nights, long after the regular bus service has stopped, people have been awakened by the roar of a bus coming down the street.' When they have gone to their windows, they have seen a brilliantly lighted double-decker bus approaching with neither driver nor passengers.
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Chapter 6: What real incident inspired the ghost bus legend in London?
According to this story, the bus goes careening to the corner of Cambridge Gardens and St. Mark's Road and then vanishes. A number of accidents have happened at this corner, and it has been suggested that the phantom bus has been the cause. By the time the inquest ended, countless people had come forward with their own stories about the phantom bus. And Mr. Pink? Well, he was found innocent.
So what exactly was going on here? Was there really an evil ghost bus cannonballing through the streets of London, mowing people down? Or was something else at play? Perhaps a clue can be found in a tiny 13-line article published just a few months later, in December of 1934. Well, it's less of an article and more of a complaint sent in by Councillor W. Jarrett.
Ladbroke Grove is a very busy road with two bus services, he wrote, yet the committee have selected the very worst lighting for this thoroughfare. Other roads with no buses are to have much better illumination. At the end of the day, I'll let you be the judge. Otherworldly automobile or simply a case of poor city planning resulting in too many fatal accidents.
Accidents that left a grieving community begging for an answer grand enough to fit the loved ones they lost. Just a stone's throw from our nation's capital. In Fairfax, Virginia, there is a small, nondescript one-lane tunnel on Colchester Road. Made of plain white concrete, it just looks like your average underpass. But it's home to one of the most absurd urban legends in the country.
Because locals claim that if you go there on Halloween night, you may be visited by the Bunny Man. There are multiple versions of this legend. One says that if you speak his name three times on Halloween night, then a man bedecked in a full-body rabbit costume will appear, and he'll slash your throat and hang you from the underpass.
Another legend claims that this bunny-suited man was once a mental ward escapee from the early 20th century. He survived by killing rabbits and wearing their skins for clothing. Eventually, his bloodthirst became uncontrollable, and he killed two children, hanging their bodies from the trees on Colchester Road. And now his crazed ghost haunts the tunnel.
If you come too close on Halloween, he will throw an axe at you. Or maybe he'll hack you to death like he did to those children all those years ago. And of course, all of this is complete nonsense. There was never a murderous escapee from a mental institution wandering the woods of Fairfax, and a ghost in a bunny suit will absolutely not appear if you try to summon him like Beetlejuice.
But there once was an axe-wielding man in a bunny suit, and he is the origin of the Bunnyman. It can all be traced back to 1970. On October 18th of that year, the Washington Post reported shortly after midnight that a couple was sitting in their car on Guinea Road and chatting, but their quiet evening was disrupted and the man in the car, Robert Bennett, was forced to go to the police.
His claim? I quote here, A man dressed in a white suit with long bunny ears ran from the nearby bushes and shouted, You're on private property and I have your tag number. The rabbit threw a wooden-handled hatchet through the right front car window, the first-year cadet told the police. As soon as he threw the hatchet, the rabbit skipped off into the night, police said.
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Chapter 7: What are the origins of the Bunny Man urban legend?
It's possible that they thought that the whole thing was an elaborate prank, but they would think again when the Bunny Man showed up two weeks later. On Halloween of 1970, the Washington News reported that two nights prior, the Bunny Man had been spotted a second time. Other newspapers soon picked up the story as well, and it spread like wildfire around the D.C. area.
Another article read, Now the 5'8 man in rabbit's clothing has struck again. A guard in a housing project under construction told police he came upon a figure in a white bunny suit with floppy ears chopping away with a hatchet at the porch of an unfinished house. When the guard approached, the bunny man said, You are trespassing. If you come any closer, I'll chop off your head.
The strange figure then turned and hippity-hopped off into the woods. And yes, folks, that is a newspaper using the actual verb hippity-hopped in their article. My, have we fallen from such lofty heights. Fairfax police never filed a police report for the earlier car incident, but they did file a report for the October 29th vandalism.
The Washington Post even wrote on that very night, six police officers responded to a call for a, quote, subject dressed as a rabbit with an axe. On Halloween night, Fairfax police received over 20 calls from people claiming to see the Bunny Man in their neighborhood.
Then, over the following weeks, police received dozens of tips from people claiming to know who the Bunny Man was or where he could be found. But every allegation led to a dead end, and the Bunny Man made no more reappearances. Local newspapers followed the story with bated breath, waiting for someone to quite literally unmask the Bunny Man.
Children started telling spooky stories about him on the playground. Psychologists weighed in on his mental state, garnering fun headlines like, Doctors Say Bunny Man's Mind Is Hopping. But the man behind the mask would never be found.
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Chapter 8: How do urban legends reflect societal fears and cultural contexts?
As the weeks passed by, people began to lose hope. December headlines morosely announced, Bunny Man Hunt Ends and Bunny Man Hops Away. On March 14th of 1971, the police marked the case as inactive. But just because the police stopped searching for the Bunny Man doesn't mean that the locals had lost interest. You see, the Bunny Man quickly morphed into an urban Halloween legend.
And I mean quickly, too. By 1973, the Bunny Man was showing up in Virginia college students' folklore essays as local urban legend. Within the span of just three years, he had gone from a possible mentally disturbed individual to a bloodthirsty ghost ready to execute anyone who approached his domain on Halloween. There is no Bunnyman ghost, but there was a Bunnyman.
So if you want to try your luck with the real deal, make your way to the Colchester Road Tunnel on Halloween night and keep an eye out for flying hatchets and cotton-tipped tails. And if things get dicey, you can always hippity-hop away. No one can deny it, Cannon Beach is beautiful.
An oceanside city in Clatsop County, Oregon, National Geographic even named the stunning coastline as one of the 100 most beautiful places back in 2013. And yet, if the legends are true, lurking along this postcard-perfect coastline is a hideous monster. And his name... is Bandage Man. The stories are said to stretch back to the 1950s, although some sources say it's older, others more recent.
Regardless of its start, though, the tale remains the same. It all began with a terrible accident. Oregon, you see, is logging country, and there was always work to be done at the local lumber mill. Trees to mill, sawdust to sweep, wood to chip. It's back-breaking labor, involving a lot of pretty dangerous machinery. The kind of machinery that could easily suck you in if you weren't careful.
They say that one night, a logger was hard at work when something went very wrong, and he was maimed beyond recognition. An ambulance sped to the scene and haphazardly wrapped the man in bandages before rushing him toward the hospital. Tragically, though, they would never arrive.
As the ambulance sped alongside the winding coastline of Highway 101, a rock slide poured into the road, burying the ambulance in the rubble. Emergency workers fought tirelessly to dig it out, but when they finally did, they found the ambulance driver dead, and the poor logger, all wrapped in bandages? Well, he had vanished without a trace. But not for long, because soon, the sightings began.
In one story, a young couple had parked off the 101 for a little alone time, so to speak. Which, look, if you've ever heard an urban legend or seen a horror movie, you already know it's a bad idea. Soon, the couple peeked out the back window and were terrified to see a looming man banging on the glass. Oh, and his most notable feature? He was entirely wrapped in bloody bandages.
In another story, a man was driving down 101 on a long, lonely night when he caught a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye. Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw a figure hunched in the back of his pickup bed, all wrapped in bandages like a mummy. In the words of Mike Helm, who published the most thorough account of this story in his book Oregon Ghosts and Legends,
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