30 Days of Demons, Day 17: Making Deals Back to Blog
Update: The ARC winner is…Melissa!! Congrats, Melissa!
“The devil went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal.
He was in a bind ‘cos he was way behind: he was willin’ to make a deal.”
Oh…one of my favorite childhood songs. 🙂 These lyrics are from “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” (by the Charlie Daniels Band). Sometimes, I catch myself singing this song to my son as a lullaby. Yes, we have odd lullabies in my house.
But the songs draws me b/c I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that the devil–or just demons– can appear and make deals with humans. Deals that don’t end well. According to legend, if you go to the crossroads, you can make a deal for just about anything. Did Tommy Johnson make a deal? Guess only he knows. And what about Robert Johnson?
I like to read different myths and legends. Sometimes it’s interesting to see the same basic story, told in different cultures.
Have you heard any good tales? Any good urban legends that you’d like to share? Leave me a comment–and I’ll pick one person to win an ARC of BELONG TO THE NIGHT. Yep, I’ve got more ARCs just waiting for you!
(By the way, I’ve been at a crossroads in Mississippi, and I sure didn’t stop for long!)
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That guy on the cover of Belong to the Night is so yummy. I want to win the ARC so I can drool over him.
No urban legends. In real life, I don’t believe in devils or demons, but they’re fun in fiction. I’m glad others think so, because there’s going to be demons in my next book.
only urban legend that I can think of is the one about the ghost that haunts the chickamuuga battlefield near where I live. Please have swore for decades that there is a ghost and they call it green eyes. No sure if that qualifies for an urban legend or not. But I will believe it when I see it. I am a realistic girl not ruling it out but not believing either till I see it with my own eyes. Love that cover and man I would love to win this one.
I live in an area ripe for Urban Legends. There was a Revolutionary Battle here. I could talk about ghosts, but can’t think of any Urban Legends. Sorry. I usually don’t give them much thought.
And I loved that song when I was young, too! (We had odd lullaby’s, too.)
I like how the crossroads thing was pulled into O Brother, Where Art Thou. No urban legends in this area that I know of!
Nope, I don’t know of any urban legend. Not that I don’t believe in them…
I’m not aware of any urban legends where I’m currently living. I know in past places there talk of ghosts at certain times of the year. Can’t remember the details. Have a great day.
No don’t know of any urban legends from around here, I am sure there are some though
The only urban legend in my area surrounds a women named Agnes. She wanders a curvy road up in the mountains looking for her lost baby. They say if you drive the road at night you will see her either on the side of the road, on top your car (causes the car to stop all of a sudden), or within your car asking “Where is my baby?” I have driven it at night one time and that was the longest 15 min drive.
1st off, I love that song and there’s even a 2nd version of it that Travis Tritt sings on (not sure who else is in it) Devil Went Back to Georgia.
We have a haunted hotel in Eureka Springs, AR. It’s very hard to book the room that’s haunted, you have to book it several years in advance.
We have crazy stories here like if you walk past this statue of a woman reading a book up on the university campus, sometimes the book will be open, sometimes it will be closed, sometimes she watches you… It does get pretty spooky at night because she faces our clock tour which glows crimson.
Growing up, we used to hang out at an old deserted crematorium (yeah we were creepy kids even then) and we quit going when someone was found murdered there. They said the place was haunted after that, but I sure wasn’t going back to find out.
Sorry I don’t know any urban tales, and truthfully I don’t pay much attention to them because they sometimes freak me out.
And before you say anything, yes it urban tales are different from reading fiction. Fiction is made up, tales, legends and myths always start out with a kernal of truth which then get exaggerated.
when i was in college in san antonio my freinds and i decided to go to the traintracks where the kids had died in the bus accident the story goes if you put baby powder on you trunk and turn your car off and park in netural the kids will push you over so we did this we waited for a really long and then we got of scared of waiting so we where going to leave but as soon as my freind reached for the ignition we got pushed over and when we checked the baby poweder there was handprints
No urban legends here in Germany, but I love to read about Myths and Legends.
People sometimes talk about the Jersey Devil here, but I don’t know much about the legend or sightings.
There’s no urban legend that I’ve heard or been aware of. Which really sucks.
I live in a small town in southeast Ohio and we have one urban legend here in this area. It originated in West Virgina, in a small town just across the river from where I live. It’s called the Mothman. The story has been told on one of those shows that investigates urban legends a few times. There is also a book, called the Mothman Prophecies, which was made into a movie starring Richard Gere about 6 or 7 years ago. All the events that supposedly happened all occurred before I was born, but I remember people talking about it when I was little.
uh I don’t know any urban legends about Mobile….i think
Here’s one from Finland:
There was once a farmer with the utmost passion for the sauna. In fact, he bathed so often that, in time, he could endure the highest heat the sauna had to offer. The hotter the sauna, the more he enjoyed it.
It became known around the land that this farmer enjoyed more heat than any sauna could produce. Eventually, word reached the Devil himself and he made a special trip up to the surface of the earth to meet this farmer.
“I hear you like the heat of a sauna,” said the Devil.
“Aye,” replied the farmer, “that I do.”
“Well then, let me take you to a place where it is so hot, you’ll be begging me to stop it.”
Excited by the Devil’s promise of heat, the farmer went willingly. Upon passing through the gates of Hell, the Devil shouted to his imps to throw more wood and coal on the giant fire.
“More heat!” yelled the grinning Devil. “We have a friend here who loves the heat.”
The farmer smiled and bowed to the Devil, thanking him for his generosity.
Soon, all of Hell was afire. It was so hot that on the earth’s surface, old volcanoes erupted and the polar ice caps began to melt.
But the farmer simply smiled. This great heat was just wonderful for him! The Devil was not enjoying this fact at all, so he pushed his imps even harder.
“More heat!” the Devil screamed fretfully. “More heat for this dumb farmer!”
By this time, everyone in Hell had gathered around the farmer and watched him in awe. Then, glancing at the Devil, they whispered among themselves and chuckled. “More heat, more heat, more heat!”
The Devil was burning with embarrassment; the Devil’s Hell was Heaven for the farmer. The farmer just smiled, again thanking the Devil for such a splendid time.
Finally, in a fit of exasperation, the Devil screamed, “Out with you! I never want to see you down here again.”
So, the farmer returned to his farm, sad to lose the wonderful heat of Hell, but pleased to know his fate was secure. Word spread across the land about what he had done, and it is told to this very day to all children that want to avoid Hell, thus going to Heaven, by going to the sauna.
http://www.sauna.org/lore-farmer.html
my favorite urban legend is the story of bunny man bridge in virginia. My ex used to live right near the actual bridge so he used to scare me with it all the time. Supposedly a serial killer murdered people there but they call him the bunny man because they would find rabbit skins everywhere. ewww.
Hey Cynthia! Love that cover. 🙂
Well, I know all the usual urban legends… you know, the ones used for the movie by the same name, 😉 But I do remember when I was a kid, in one of the houses I used to live, I’d hear strange noises at night and the window blinds would shut by themselves. Freaky stuff for a kid.
Of course, my parents didn’t believe me but the neighbourhood kids used to tell us that apparently there used to be a cemetery situated where the house was built. :/ Never knew whether to believe that one or not, but it was cool to finally have some sort of explanation for the freaky stuff.
I was really glad when we moved out of that house.
There aren’t any urban legends from my town. I don’t think I believe in them anyways, but I love to read about demons in books though.
I don’t have any Urban Legends in my neck of the woods, but I do watch Monster Quest on the History Channel though. That show is all about myths and legends. Does that count?
I unfortunately don’t know any of the urban legends from where I currently live, Minneapolis, but I grew up in Sunnyvale, California, where the Toys ‘R’ Us is supposedly haunted. There have been stories about toys getting moved around by unseen hands and women have felt their hair brushed when there was no one there. The ghost is supposed to be a man named Johnny Johnson, who was a hired hand for the Murphy family, who founded Sunnyvale. He was chopping wood one day,cut his leg, and bled to death. Because the Toys ‘R’ Us was built on the site of the orchard he worked at, he believes he has to keep working.
I have never actually been brave enough to go to the Toys ‘R’ Us store, although the ghost is supposedly benign.
Cute! Well my parents never told me any interesting urban legends, they just read to me, or i read to myself. I like in New Jersey, so almost all of us have heard about the Jersey Devil…and Bloody Mary at camp sacajewia for girl scout camp. None of us would go to the bathroom at all! And my town has heard tons of stories from the Spy House, a really old sorta lighthouse in Jersey. I swear i saw the dead woman in the window waiting for husband last year!
Hmmm, lemme see…
La Llorona comes to mind. A Mexican woman in colonial times Mexico City who lost her children, and wanders the streets in the small hours of the morning, calling for them and crying. [Different reasons are given for the children’s deaths: from a jealous husband punishing the mother, to a plague-like epidemic]
Oh and then there’s El árbol de la noche triste (it is said that Cortés sat down on it’s roots to cry for the loss of life [Spaniards] on their flight from Tenochttitlan [now Mexico City] on June 30th, 1520) but I’m not sure that counts as a legend, as there are some historic accounts that give it some validity.
There are many more but I’ll stop at two.
Well, I’m actually from England and we have a lot of urban legends there. Like the headless lady who haunts Hampstead Heath and many, many others. I’ve never experienced them myself though.
And that is a great prize!!!!
Urban legends? I can think of a few places that are supposed to be haunted by a ghost or two(nothing horrible, supposedly people just see them standing or walking around) but of all the times I’ve been to those places, I’ve never come across them. 🙂
I absoluetely love the story of El Chupacabra, the goat sucker. It was a vampiric animal (some thought mammalian, while others thought reptilian) who feed off the blood of other animals. Large livestock were found dead, having bled out through several small puncture wounds. Creepy, yes? Oh, and as a joke my friends refer to their home as Club Chupacabra. LOL!
The other good one was the Mothman, which was made into a movie. I think the most interesting thing about the Mothman is that it seemed to show up just before major disasters occurred and some believe that he is some kind of angel trying to warn us of impending doom.
I can’t think of any urban legends to share at the moment, but I love to hear about them from others and also to read stories about them.
I was in a completely different part of Texas but heard about the kids in the bus at the train tracks also. That one seemed to have gotten around. I also recall the one about cars flashing their lights at you to pick you for being beat up as part of a gang initiation. Might have been true somewhere but not by the time it got to podunk, tennessee!
As a kid, we used to do the “Bloody Mary” chant, and had a creepy time or two doing that.
As an adult, we visited the “Skunk Ape” museum in the everglades. There wasn’t much there on the Skunk Ape (the everglades version of Bigfoot), other than a video that was playing of a documentary on it. But there was a fun little “zoo”, and we got to hold a 3 foot young gator.
nfmgirl AT gmail DOT com
Well, I don’t have any other than in NJ we have the Jersey Devil, though I don’t know the details of it exactly. . . and I had to learn that we have a legend from an episode of the X-Files when I caught up with the reruns some years ago. LOL Hey, I’ll say I have one if Fox Mulder shows up at my house! 🙂
Lois
No urban legends do I know. But my brother in law knew a couple who bought a house in downtown Montreal after there had been a murder in this house and from the time they moved in strange things were happening every day: doors closing on their own, windows slamming shut, all kinds of weird things. It got so bad they up and left the house and bought somewhere else; to this day the house is still empty and they swear all these things were true
I’ve heard a lot about urban legends. One is the headlight one. I also have a book on urban legends.
There is only one urban legend that I can think of. When I was in grade school some of the older kids told us to go into the bathroom and stand before the mirror. You were supposed to say “bloody Mary” I believe three times and turn around and you were supposed to see her. I never did but my friend started screaming saying she saw her.
my town i live in housed slaved waiting for exicution weird i know but their is a legend about devils tree in my home town we have alot of creepy legends that we tell our kids one i can remember as a child about devils woods where they come out at night and grab a sinner or a saint depending on the legand andgut them but i dont know seems theres a lot of legends that get passed down from one generation to the next personally i believe in everything ghosts demons angels i think as a living being not only are we cocky and selfish thinking we r all that was created is obsurd and rediculous and self centered i think that humans over look the obvious becauuse they are afraid of stepping out side of the box because it may change an asspect of how they live instead of just believeing because they believe
oops o sorta rambled on and on id love to be entered
We have the Jersey Devil down in the Pine Barrens, but that’s the only local urban legend I can think of off the top of my head. Seeing the Jersey Devil is supposed to be an omen of disaster. Thankfully, no one I know has ever seen it!
Love the cover of Belong to the Night! This guy is….well, ‘yum’ is a good word. 🙂
Would love one of the ARCs! Thanks!
Great song. The only urban legend or tale I have heard is that supposedly some relative of mine was sleeping in a cabin somewhere in southernish Missouri. And at night it would sound like a group of Indians was riding right into the house.
I love to read about legends from others though.
🙁 no good urban legends or tales… um… wow no. I’m sadly boring. That and my brain has melted from uber long days.
Devil Went Down to Georgia is a great song though – heh.
The only one I no of is to leave milk out for the fairys to keep them happy and thay will help keep your house clean.its and old one.
sasluvbooks@yahoo.com
I went to a high school in Hawaii that had a fire in the band room a long time ago. People said that if you went to the high school late at night you can hear screams on campus.
We have a legendary rock near my town, a popular tourist stop:
Laddin’s Rock Sanctuary is the site of the legend of Dutch settler, Cornelius Labden. In 1642, Ladben rode his horse off a cliff to avoid capture by the Indians who had just tomahawked and scalped his wife and daughter right before his eyes. Today, Laddin’s Rock is an 18-acre preserve on the Greenwich/Stamford border.
I’ve heard a few different urban legends about places I’ve been.
There was the one about the witch house in New York close to where my cousin lived. It was said that each time a person or group of people went by the house there were the exact number of candles in the window as there were people passing by. My cousin told me that she and her friends tried it out one day by driving by once and then dropping off two people a block over and driving by again, and the number of candles did change.
The other one has to do with the building I work in now. It’s the main hall of the university where I attended my undergraduate program and is supposedly haunted by a dead priest. The story goes that there was once a couple who did the cleaning on campus after the main offices closed at 5. One night, they split up with the woman cleaning Main Hall. As she was cleaning one of the windows on the second floor, it shut on her hand and then got stuck. She couldn’t lift it and she couldn’t reach a phone to call her husband who was cleaning a building across campus. Just as she was beginning to panic, a man dressed as a priest showed up and helped her get her hand free but disappeared just before her husband arrived, frantic because a man had told him something was wrong and he needed to check on his wife. The next day, when they were walking through Main Hall after meeting with the security people, the couple looked at a picture hanging in the hallway and recognized the man they’d both seen the night before. It was the same man, and he was in a picture that was 100 years old.
Needless to say, I try not to think about that story when I end up being the last one working on my floor late at night. lol
LOL, I STILL listen to The Devil Went Down to Georgia…have it on my iPod.
Huh……..we have this really cool old TB assylum in Louisville, it’s reported to be haunted. It was even on that show of America’s most haunted places, where they tried to stay the night?? Waverly Hills. There was even a movie made loosely based on this places tales…The Death Tunnel. While I was growing up, you always heard how they threw the bodies down the “body chute” when they died, and how they tortured and experimented on patients. They have been opening it up for haunted houses the last few years, to raise money to restore it….we went last year. Talk about freaking yourself OUT!! LOL, my daughter, who was 15 then, psyched herself up SO much she was convinced she was seeing a ghost in one of the windows before we even got up the hill in the line, and freaked out 1/2 way through and had to leave.
LOL and now she wants me to pay $100 to stay the night there.
This place is SO gothic, and creepy…..there are a bunch of websites, but here is one to check out:
http://www.prairieghosts.com/waverly_tb.html
My friend Vickie lives down the street from it, so we pass by it all the time…..you can’t see it from the main road, it sits up on a hill and is posted, so that makes it all the more mysterious. It’s GREAT!! I just imagine some of the gothic books I read set here…it’s a perfect place for Underworld types to hang out!!
LOL, okay, I forgot to tell you…….we always dared one another to walk up the drive way. We’d drive up to it, and one time we convinced this guy, Benny, to get out and walk up. ~~snicker~~ and we started to drive off while he was walking w/ his back turned. OMG, he flew back to car……I still chuckle thinking about that. We scared the crap out of ourselves w/ Waverly.
Who doesn’t love that song 😀
Urban legends, have quite a few in my area due to a lot of the civil war was fought here. One in particular is at Kennesaw Mountain. It is said that at night you can here cannons going off and watch confederate soliders running by.
There is local restaurant near me that is said to be haunted by 2 ghosts. The restaurant was built over where a house use to be and in that house a mother and daughter were killed. Well it is said that if you use the upstairs bathroom, sometimes you are locked in by one of the ghosts. Don’t know how true, don’t use the bathroom 😀
I think lots of people proabbaly know about Resurrection Mary. The ghost that haunts a particular cemetary here in Chicago but looks so real she has people stop and pick her up. She gives directions to a house thats at the end of the cemetary but before the person drives all the way past the cememtary she makes them stop, gets out and vanishes.
Personally I’ve seen her twice. Have I stopped for her? No. I just watched her walking down the sidewalk next the cemetary as I drove along the street. The only ghost of local legend that I’ve ever seen. And not once but twice.
lol @ the song Cynthia. Do you know I first heard that on this cartoon when I was little – The Devil and Daniel Mouse? Have you seen it before?
I am located in south Alabama – about an hr and 1/2 north of Mobile. I can’t think of ay specific Urban Legends offhand.. though there are dozens around.
I do that The Thirteen Ghosts of Alabama was a big thing though – can see it on Amazon :
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/087397008X/102-8474558-0627352?v=glance&st=*