Skeptophilia

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urb...

New from the "I Thought I'd Heard Everything" department, we have: a warning that you should look out for a specific kind of t...

Whenever I post anything about goofy beliefs, urban legends, and superstitions -- like my piece Monday about spells to summon up demons -- i...

American economist Thomas Sowell famously said, "Endless repetition does not make something true." I used to run into examples of...

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stron...

In the menagerie of weird creatures from urban legends we have such entities as the Men in Black, Slender Man, the Black-eyed Children, not ...

Well, it's happened again; a reader has sent me a weird superstition (this one almost amounts to an urban legend) that I'd never hea...

It's seldom that we can pinpoint the exact moment of origin of an urban legend.  Much more commonly, they start out from a campfire tale...

The advent of the internet gave a whole new life to the phenomenon of urban legends.  When I was a kid (back in the good ol' Ancient Bab...