Welcome to watch mojo and today we're counting down our picks for the top 10 most well known scary urban legends that turned out not to be true.

Please donna, you have to believe me.

What about Bloody mary for this list?

Will be looking at the most popular urban legends with absolutely zero basis and recorded history.

Which of these stories do you find the scariest?

Let us know in the comments below number 10.

Bloody mary as any 10 year old can tell you.

Bloody mary doesn't actually appear when you chant her name in a mirror.

Bloody mary.

Bloody mary.

However, there is a fascinating history and some scientific explanations concerning the urban legend.

The ritual comes from an old practice in which young women walked backwards up a flight of stairs of the hand mirror.

If they saw the face of the grim reaper, it was said that they would die before mary, Bloody mary.

Bloody mary.

Bloody mary.

See nothing happened, why would you do that?

And those who absolutely swear they saw bloody mary that one time were just hallucinating a dark space can actually cause people to hallucinate which may result in seeing another face next to yours.

So yes, bloody mary does exist but only in our heads.

Okay, let's do it.

Number nine, the clown statue, a babysitter gets on the phone with the parents and ask them if she can throw a blanket over there clown statue.

It's giving her the creeps and she'd rather not look at the parents gasp and tell her to get out of the house because they don't have a clown statue done.

Done, done.

It's an admittedly creepy story, but it's only a variation on another, more popular herb.

For one thing, the story doesn't make any sense.

Why would the killer a dress themselves up like a clown and be stand in the corner for hours.

There are also no historical records of something like this ever happening.

So sleep soundly.

Number eight, The Vanishing hitchhiker.

There are a ton of variations on this popular story, but the general gist is as follows, A person is driving along a dark and deserted road when they come across a hitchhiker.

Hi, you want a lift.

Feeling benevolent.

They decide to give them a ride.

They talk or maybe the passenger just sits there acting all creepy.

It's not until they reach their destination that the driver looks away from the road and realizes there is no passenger, but no, this has never actually happened.

Yes, there are written personal accounts of people experiencing this phenomenon, but there's no hard evidence that has ever occurred.

It's nothing but a popular piece of folklore, possibly exaggerated by hallucinations and or delusions.

I wanted to see somebody with me.

Number seven, slender man.

It's amazing to see how quickly a new urban legend can percolate through society.

The legend of Slenderman was created in june of 2009 and he quickly became an icon of 21st century pop culture, Slenderman can be seen as a modern piece of folklore.

Everyone knows the story.

There are first hand eyewitness accounts that change with each telling etcetera, etcetera.

In fact, some academics have examined the Slenderman mythology to study how folktales are formed and spread.

Of course, we all know that Slenderman isn't real.

He was created by eric knudsen who was participating in a Photoshop contest on the forum, something awful.

The post was well received.

It spread through the internet and the rest is history.

He is the thing that we fear that we don't actually encounter numbers six, the babysitter and the man upstairs remember that clown story from earlier.

That's essentially this.

But with a twist, this is an incredibly popular urban legend and its basic storyline has been adapted into numerous films including Black Christmas and when a stranger calls who is this?

Basically, a babysitter is taunted by threatening phone calls.

They're eventually traced and they're coming from inside the house.

We traced the call is coming from inside the house, but like the similar clown story, there's no historical basis of this ever happening.

The main inspiration for the story is the unsolved death of Jeanette Christman who was killed babysitting a child in 1950.

However, this case does not feature a killer hiding upstairs, threatening phone calls or the police telling her that the calls were coming from inside the house.

Yes, Hello.

Um I've been getting obscene phone calls and I want to know what can be done about it.

Number five, the killer in the backseat.

This urban legend still has us checking our back seats.

The story goes that a woman is driving late at night when she is accosted by another driver.

It's not until later that she realizes there was someone in the back seat of her car and the driver had been attempting to warn her.

This legend certainly has some roots.

In reality.

There have been cases of criminals hiding in back seats and one case in 1964 saw a police officer shooting someone who had been hiding in their personal vehicle.

It's likely that the urban legend stemmed from these stories and grew an exaggeration as it was spread.

There are no recorded instances of an event playing out exactly as it occurs in the legend.

Number four H I V needles.

If you believe everything you read on the internet, you think that the world was full of sociopaths?

Luckily this is not the case.

In the early years of the internet, a scary urban legend was spread through chain emails and silly articles.

Apparently people were jabbing random strangers with needles infected with HIV.

Either that or the needles were found in discreet locations that a stranger might touch.

They were in this alleyway when they found some needles.

There are some true stories of people sitting on needles that have been left behind as a malicious prank.

None of them have been infected with HIV.

In fact, there are only a few documented cases of an intentional HIV needle attack, but none of them involved random assault on the street.

Number three, the hanging boyfriend, a couple are stranded on the side of the road.

The girlfriend tells her boyfriend to go get gas so he does while waiting.

She hears a mysterious sound on the roof of the car.

Police then approached the car and tell the woman to exit the vehicle without looking back.

She can't help herself and she sees the body of her boyfriend hanging from a tree, his fingers scraping against the roof.

Like all the other urban legends, this has never actually happened.

It's very likely that this story was influenced by a real lovers lane killing but the specifics were exaggerated and warped through the countless retellings.

It's a game of telephone run amok number two bugs in brains.

This story plays on two fears.

One is the fear of nasty insects.

The other is the fear of invasion or more specifically the fear of something unnatural being inside our bodies.

They know where you are because they can sense the carbon dioxide you exhale.

There are countless urban legends involving an insect crawling into someone's ear to eat their brains.

Lay some eggs.

Yes, small insects can in fact crawl into our ears and yes, there are recorded instances of them doing so.

However, none go into lay eggs and they certainly don't eat brains.

In fact, it's physically impossible for a bug to go any further than the ear drum.

Most of the time they simply wander in, freak out and make their way back out without causing any damage.

You know what this probably is?

I bet this is a moth.

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The hook, This is perhaps the most famous urban legend of the 20th century.

Another lover's Lane story.

This one involves a couple hearing on the radio that a killer has escaped from a local institution or prison.

The killer for the purposes of dramatic storytelling has a hook.

They talk about how freaky that is, and later they discover a hook hanging from the car's door handle.

Many people have tried tracing the roots of this story with some placing its origins in the 19 fifties and others in victorian europe.

Either way, it's completely made up.

It's a good story and nothing more and it was probably spread to scare promiscuous young couples and lovers lanes across the country.

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