SHOCK! HORROR! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Simon Young. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. University of Mississippi Press. 2022.

I have always felt that not enough attention has been paid to the disastrous effects of cycling. Now held as the key to a new urban utopia of fume-free, polar-bear friendly, sustainable transport, it seems the Victorians had a more critical view of dangers of the then novel machines. They identified a number of afflictions resulting from excessive cycling, for instance the Bicycle Face.

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GHOST TOWNS AND HAUNTED CITIES

Karl Bell (Editor) Supernatural Cities; Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality. Boydell Press, 2019.

Karl Bell is the author of The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914, a fascinating account of the persistence of supernatural beliefs in the growing industrial urban areas of the 'long nineteenth century'. [Reviewed HERE]
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SLENDERMAN - LIVING THE LEGEND

Trevor J Blank and Lynne S McNeill (Editors). Slender Man is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet. University Press of Colorado, 2018.

Who by now who follows Fortean themes, especially the contemporary ones, has not heard of the Slender Man? For the handful of you who may have emerged from your survivalist compound in the woods in order to top up your hoard of jerky, he/it is an abnormally tall, thin humanoid, dressed in a black suit and tie. Faceless, he loiters in the shade in children's playgrounds in exactly the manner that one should not.
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SIZING UP SLENDERMAN

Nick Redfern. The Slenderman Mysteries: An Internet Urban Legend Comes to Life. New Page Books, 2018.

By now, most followers of forteana will have heard of the Slenderman. This creation, if that is what it is, started out ‘life’ on the website Something Awful, which is a comedy site. The creature itself loosely resembles a man in a black suit and wearing a black tie. All likeness to a human being stops there, as the face is blank, it is far too tall and thin and, on occasion, it has tentacles.

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STORIES ALL AROUND

Mark Rees. Ghosts of Wales; Accounts from the Victoria Archives. History Press, 2017.

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Wendy Hughes. The A-Z of Curious Sussex. History Press, 2017.

When reading books of ghost stories, particularly those related to a specific location, it is often the case that the stories are retold and edited in a way that sometimes bears no relationship to any original account or testimony, and we are often presented with a homogenised and rather standardised narrative.
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FROM THIN AIR

Shire Chess and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man. The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave, 2016.

Something happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on 31st May 2014. That something was the attempted sacrifice of a human being. The incident involved three 12 year-old girls. According to reports in the media, two of the girls enticed the third into local woodland. The two then stabbed the third nineteen times and left her for dead.
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THE KIDS NEXT DOOR

David Weatherly. Strange Intruders. Leprechaun Publishing, 2016.

Most of us have heard of neighbours from Hell who make life quite intolerable for those around them, but few would take the idea literally. However, as this book shows, there are those in the United States who claim that they have had neighbours who if not exactly from Hell are to put it mildly, pretty damn weird and who seem to lack most human social conventions.

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DON'T PANIC!

Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall. A Colorful History of Popular Delusions. Prometheus Books, 2015.

Robert Bartholomew, in association with several collaborators, has written a series of books on a number of popular panics, rumours and dubious beliefs, most recently a comprehensive discussion of schoolyard panics. In this present title he and Peter Hassall offer a generalised round-up of irrational mass actions, arranging them in a typology ranging from vague rumour and gossip, to full scale riot.
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DOUBTFUL IN DUBLIN

Brendan Nolan. Dublin Urban Legends. History Press, Dublin. 2015.

Most cities of the world have "urban legends", those stories often told in pubs and other situations where conversation, perhaps affected by alcohol, verges on the fantastic. That is to say, a story that started as a fantasy or figment of someone's imagination when repeated often enough becomes accepted as fact.
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HIT AND MYTH

Grace Banks and Sheena Blackhall. Scottish Urban Myths and Ancient Legends. History Press, 2014.

This book follows on from titles covering contemporary legends and rumours in Kent by Neil Arnold, and London by Scott Wood. However, the addition to the title of the words 'and Ancient legends' radically changes the nature and scope of the book, making it quite different from its predecessors.
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STRANGE TALES

Robert Damon Schneck, Mrs Wakeman vs. the Antichrist. Tarcher Penguin, 2014.

Here are eleven essays on bizarre phenomena in American history, from a murderous cult in the mid-nineteenth century to the phantom clown panics at the end of the twentieth.
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CLASS REACTION

Robert E. Bartholomew with Bob Rickard. Mass Hysteria in Schools: A Worldwide History Since 1566. McFarland, 2014.

It’s not impossible that an episode of mass-hysteria might have sparked a major Middle-Eastern conflict. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but for a while it was a definite threat. In 1983 schoolgirls at a Palestinian school in the Israeli West Bank began to complain of headaches and blurred vision. They said their symptoms began when they started to smell a sulphurous odour which leaked into their classrooms. The school was evacuated.
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SHEFFIELD SHUDDERS

David Clarke. Scared to Death and Other Ghost Stories from Victorian Sheffield. ACM Retro, 2013.

Many books of local ghost stories consist of either vague rumours of the “it is said” variety, or tales of “vigils” held by organisations with strange sounding names, usually accompanied by a tame psychic or two. Not so this book. 

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LONDON PECULIARS

Scott Wood. London Urban Legends. History Press, 2013.

To many people London can be an alarming place: big, busy, noisy; you are surrounded by strangers, strangers who at any time might want to do you harm. Travelling on the Underground can be confusing: sitting - or more likely standing - in the train you may be singled out as a ‘mark’ by a pickpocket, or if you are a woman, as a potential victim for a frotteur.
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KENTISH TALES

Neil Arnold. Kent Urban Legends: The Phantom Hitch-Hiker and Other Stories. The History Press, 2013.

Blue Bell Hill, that sounds a nice place, doesn’t it? Redolent of Enid Blyton and sunny picnics with lashings of ginger beer. Don’t go there. Literally. Don’t go there. According to Neil Arnold, you’re likely to bump into any number of phantom hitchhikers, whether they’re a bride killed on the way to her wedding, a cyclist mown down by a car or the gruesome end products of various other road-traffic accidents.
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SCOUSELORE

S. D. Tucker. Paranormal Merseyside. Amberley, 2013.

Any book which says “[T]he journal Magonia, the main outlet for what might be termed ‘alternative’ perspectives and viewpoints upon ufology, was based in Liverpool under the auspices of its Liverpudlian editor, John Rimmer, for a long period, which is surely worth celebrating” is pretty well assured of a good review here! However, even without this endorsement this book will be getting a good review.
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