We all remember the stupid rumours and urban legends that we heard as kids at school. A lot of them were gaming related (the cheat code for a naked Lara Croft, unlocking Akuma in Street Fighter 2) but there were also ones with a much more local flavour. What ones did you hear and did you fall for any of them?
I can remember a rumour going around the school that some bloke had predicted that the school was going to be blown up on a certain day, which just happened to be a couple of days after the rumour started. Kids were absolutely shitting themselves, the tension got so bad that an assembly was called to tell everyone that it was rubbish, the prediction was not true and that nothing was going to happen. That didn’t calm things down much, if anything it made kids think that the teachers were obviously hiding things. Once the day had passed with nothing happening, it was barely ever mentioned again.
One of the things I did fall for was a rumour that Guns n Roses were going to be in the Galleries in Bristol to give away free merchandise/CDs and meet people. A load of us planned to bunk off school to go along and get some free stuff. I actually put jeans and a t-shirt into my school bag that day so I could change out of uniform so the police wouldn’t know I was bunking off! We all gathered on the bus stop near school to get the bus into Bristol and then suddenly seemed to all realise that it was probably a bollocks story and that we would only get in trouble if we went.
Near my house there were some fields (known as the hilly fields, there were hills there
) and the local legend was that a civil war battle was fought there. I have no idea if that is actually true, but that legend turned into the fields being haunted. If you went down there at night on the anniversary of the battle (I can’t remember what the date was supposed to be!) then you would see the ghosts coming out of the mist to fight again. This used to terrify me as a kid, I genuinely believed that thousands of ghosts would be fighting just behind the house. If only I had had Barry Dodds number back then….