The Mysterious Kay's Cross

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Most of them, in some way or another, resembled Eddie Munson from Stranger Things. These folks, though, did not fit that mold. Theune Fort 100 Company, Proctor, and Gamble. You see, they were accused of supporting Satanism, and it was all because of their logo. It looked innocent enough. On one side there was a crescent moon with a man's face . Think man and the moon, right? On the other side, there were 13 stars. And to the average person, it honestly just looked like a stylized depiction of the night sky. But paranoid Pearl Clut chers claimed that the image contained satanic imagery. The curls in the moon's hair, for example, were actually supposed to be subtle devil's horns, and the stars, when connected like a constellation, could form the number 66 6, the mark of the beast. The company denied the claims, of course, they'd had that logo since 1851, and the 13 stars were meant to represent the 13 original colonies, but it was too late. The panic had fully set in, and no amount of reasoning would dissuade the true believers. The company was forced to change their logo in the 1990s, and thankfully that seemed to do the trick. The rumors died down, and today Proctor and Gamble is known less for their potential ties to the powers of hell and more for their monopoly over consumer goods. The lesson, though, is clear. It doesn't take much for a rumor to spiral out of control. A sneaking suspicion, a scary story, even a little joke, all of them can be sucked into the cultural zeitgeist faster than you can say, mark of the beast. So be careful what you believe, because you never know when a bit of fantasy could actually become an urban legend . I'm Aaron Mankey, and this Sailors of course have ghost shi ps. Road trippers have phantom semi-trucks charging at traffic before vanishing into thin air. There are even legends of spectral airplanes hovering out of time. And in 1934, London, England had the number seven bus. According to the popular story, it all started one dark night in June. A young man was driving through Ladbrook Grove in the area of North Kensington. Perhaps he was coming home from a long day at work. I imagine he was tired and looking forward to getting back to rest his feet. It was late, and the roads were empty. But as he turned onto a dim intersection, the man's heart leapt into his throat. There, out of nowhere appeared a bus . Now, if you're imagining one of those classic red double decker London buses, you would be right on the mark, and this one bore the number seven on its side, along with the word general , which was odd, given that the London General Omnibus Company had folded a year prior in 1933. Oh, and also, this bus happened to be charging right for him. The man swerved to avoid it, running off the road and smashed into the wall of a building. Just as he did, the bus vanished into thin air. Now, the story branches in two different directions from here. Some say that the man died on impact, and that it was a pedestrian witness who ran to the police to report the strange encounter. Others say that the man miraculously survived the crash, living to tell the tale himself. Either way, a legend was born. Ladbroke Gro ve had a ghost bus. Word spread like wildfire, and so did the sightings. In the summer of 1934, talk of the number seven was on everyone's lips, and the summer of 35 for that matter, and 36, and In the words of one modern witness, I saw this bus in November 1967. It was number seven and was parked halfway between the station and the bend at the other end, two minutes past the bus I, joked, let's go a ride in the bus. We turned around, it was gone, disappeared. It was only 20 years later, visiting London from Canada, that I heard of this phantom bus on the radio. It seems that the phantom Bus of Ladbrook Grove had become a full-blown urban legend. Now, maybe it's a flaw of mine, but I just can't take a story at face value. I'm always hungry to dig deeper, especially when it comes to something like this, where so much hearsay is involved. So my team dug a little deeper and found something pretty wild. Because see, while it has all the markings of pure fiction, this story can actually be traced back to a real-life incident and a real-life death. It turns out that there was indeed a car accident in that spot on June 12, 1934. The driver was a man named Ian James Stephen Beaton, a 25-year-old metallurg ical engineer. But he wasn't the only driver involved. Beaton's car collided with another, driven by a chauffeur named George Pink. Pink was unscathed, but unfortunately not so for poor Ian Beaton. He died there, in the middle of the road. Just a few days later, on June 15th, an inquest followed to determine whether or not Mr. Pink was guilty of vehicular manslaughter. Witnesses were called to the stand. One M,r. Frank Robinson, was in the middle of describing the wet slippery roads when he was interrupted and asked a rather strange question. What about the Phantom Bus? And Mr. Robinson admitted that he did indeed know about the legend. In fact, everyone did. Contrary to most modern reports about the urban legend, rumors of the ghost bus didn't start with Beaton's death. Oh no, it had been whispered about for ages. And it seems either the defense or some sensationalizing journalists were trying to use this phantom bus rumor to get Mr. Pink off the hook. After all, if there had been a ghost, well the accident wouldn't have been George Pink's fault, now would it? In a July 1934 newspaper article, one local resident described the legend in detail. It's been going on strong for years, she said. I have never met anybody who has seen the bus, but the version I heard was that on certain nights, long after the regular bus service has stopped, people have been awakened by the roar of a bus coming down the street. Decker bus approaching with neither driver nor passengers. According to this story, the bus goes careening to the corner of Cambridge Gardens and St. Mark's Road and then vanishes. A number of accidents have happened at this corner, and it has been suggested that the Phantom Bus has been the cause. By the time the inquest ended, countless people had come forward with their own stories about the Phantom Bus. And Mr. Pink? Well, he was found innocent. So, what exactly was going on here? Was there really an evil ghost bus cannonballing through the streets of London, mowing people down? Or was something else at play? Perhaps a clue can be found in a tiny 13-line article published just a few months later in December of 1934. Well it's less of an article and more of a complaint sent in by Counselor W. Jarrett. Ladbroke Grove is a very busy road with two bus services, he wrote, yet the committee have selected the very worst lighting for this thoroughfare. Other roads with no buses are to have much better illumination. At the end of the day, I'll let you be the judge. Otherworldly automobile , or simply a case of poor city planning resulting in too many fatal accidents. Accidents that left a grieving community begging for an answer? Grand enough to fit the loved ones they lost. Just a stone's throw from our nation's capital. In Fairfax, Virginia, there is a small nondescript one-lane tunnel on Colchester Road. Made of plain white concrete, it just looks like your average underpass, but it's home to one of the most absurd urban legends in the country, because locals claim that if you go there on Halloween nights, you may be visited by the bunny man. There are multiple versions of this legend. One says that if you speak his name three times on Halloween nights, then a man bedecked in a full-body rabbit costume will appear, and he'll slash your throat and hang you from the underpass. Another legend claims that this bunny-suited man was once a mental ward escapee from the early 20th century. He survived by killing rabbits and wearing their skins for clothing. Eventually his bloodthirst became uncontrollable, and he killed two children, hanging their bodies from the trees on Colchester Road. And now his crazed ghost haunts the tunnel. If you come too close on Halloween, he will throw an axe at you. Or maybe he'll hack you to death like he did to those children all those years ago. And of course, all of this is complete nonsense. There was never a murderous escapee from a mental institution wandering the woods of Fairfax, and a ghost in a bunny suit will absolutely not appear if you try to summon him like Betelgeuse. But there once was an axe wielding man in a bunny suit, and he is the origin of the bunny man. It can all be traced back to nineteen seventy. On October eighteenth of that year, the Washington Post reported shortly after midnight that, a couple was sitting in their car on Guinea Road and chatting, but their quiet evening was disrupted, and the man in the car, Robert Bennett, was forced to go to the police. His claim? I quote here: a man dressed in a white suit with long bones You're on private property and I have your tag number. The rabbit threw a wooden handled hatchet through the right front car window. The first year cadet told the pol ice. As soon as he threw the hatchet, the rabbit skipped off into the night, police said. Bennett and his fiancé were not injured. Bennett was able to give the hatchet to the police, but they could garner very little evidence from it. It's possible that they thought that the whole thing was an elaborate prank, but they would think again when the bunny man showed up two weeks later. On Halloween of nineteen seventy, the Washington News reported that two nights prior, the bunny man had been spotted a second time. Other newspapers soon picked up the story as well, and it spread like wildfire around the DC area. Another article read, Now the five foot eight man in rabbit cl'otshing has struck again. A guard in a housing project under construction told police he came upon a figure in a white bunny suit with floppy ears chopping away with a hatchet at the porch of an unfinished house. When the guard approached, the bunny man said, You are trespassing. If you come any closer, I'll chop off your head. The strange figure then turned, and Hippety hopped off into the woods. And yes folks, that is a newspaper using the actual verb hippity hopped in their article. My have we fallen from such lofty heights. Fairfax police never filed a police report for the earlier car incident, but they did file a report for the October 29th vandalism. The Washington Post even wrote on that very night, six police officers responded to a call for a quote, subject dressed as a rabbit with an axe. On Halloween night, Fairfax police received over 20 calls from people claiming to see the bunny man in their neighborhood. Then over the following weeks, police received dozens of tips from people claiming to know who the bunny man was or where he could be found, but every allegation led to a dead end, and the bunny man made no more reappearances. Local newspapers followed the story with bated breath, waiting for someone to quite literally unmask the bunny man. Children started telling spooky stories about him on the playground. Psychologists weighed in on his mental state, garnering fun headlines like Doctors say Bunny Man's Mind is hopping. But the man behind the mask would never be found. As the weeks passed by, people began to lose hope. December headlines morosely announced Bunyman Hunt Ends and Bunyman Hops Away. On March 14th, 1971, the police marked the case as inactive. But just because the police stopped searching for the bunny man doesn't mean that the locals had lost interest. You see, the bunny man quickly morphed into an urban Halloween legend, and I mean quickly too, by 1973, the bunny man was showing up in Virginia College students' folklore essays as local urban legend. Within the span of just three years, he had gone from a possible mentally disturbed individual to a bloodthirsty ghost, ready to execute any one who approached his domain on Halloween. There is no bunny man ghost, but there was a bunny man. So if you want to try your luck with the real deal, make your way to the Colchester Road Tunnel on Halloween night and keep an eye out for flying hatchets and cotton tip tails. And if things get dicey, you can always hippity hop away . No one can deny it. Cannon Beach is beautiful. An oceanside city in Clatsup County, Oregon, National Geographic even named the stunning coastline as one of the 100 most beautiful places back in 2013. And yet, if the legends are true, lurking along this postcard perfect coastline is a hideous monster, and his name is Bandage Man. The stories are said to stretch back to the 1950s, although some sources say it's older, others more recent. Regardless of its start, though, the tale remains the same. It all began with a terrible accident. Oregon, you see, is logging country, and there was always work to be done at the local lumber mill. Trees to mill, sawdust to sweep, wood to chip. It's back-breaking labor, involving a lot of pretty dangerous machinery, the kind of machinery that could easily suck you in if you weren't careful. They say that one night a logger was hard at work when something went very wrong, and he was maimed beyond recognition. An ambulance sped to the scene and haphazardly wrapped the man in bandages before rushing him toward the hospital. Tragically, though, they would never arrive. As the ambulance sped alongside the winding coastline of Highway 101, a rock slide poured into the road, burying the ambulance in the rubble. Emergency workers fought tirelessly to dig it out, but when they finally did, they found the ambulance driver dead, and the poor logger, all wrapped in bandages ? Well, he had vanished without a trace. But not for long. Because soon, the sightings began. In one story, a young couple had parked off the 101 for a little alone time, so to speak. Which look, if you've ever heard an urban legend or seen a horror movie, you already know it's a bad idea. Soon, the couple peeked out the back window and were terrified to see a looming man banging on the glass. Oh, and his most notable feature, he was entirely wrapped in bloody bandages. In another story, a man was driving down 101 on a long, lonely night when he caught a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye. Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw a figure hunched in the back of his pickup bed, all wrapped in bandages like a mummy. In the words of Mike Helm, who published the most thorough account of this story in his book Oregon Ghosts and Legends, his eyes were just little holes in the bandages with nothing inside, and his mouth was punctuated by red lips dripping with something, saliva or rain, or blood. Startled though he was, the driver figured that he would be safe enough. After all, the mummy was outside the cab and he was inside, with a hearty piece of safety glass between them. Which of course is when bandaged man began to punch through the back windshield. With horror, the driver realized that the attacker was going to make his way inside. The man drove faster, hoping to shake the interloper loose, then eventually, as he neared town, bandaged man dropped off, vanishing into the dark. In yet another account, also from Mike Helm's book, Bandage Man snatches up a hitchhiker, folding him under his arm like, and I quote, a loaf of bread, and then vanishes into the woods. In another, he starts snacking on neighborhood dogs, and yet another heat shatters the windows of a local pub and preys on the patrons inside. And okay, a lot of these reports are just fanciful enough that they do sound like someone made them up. In fact, my researchers weren't able to find any written accounts of Bandageman at all that dated prior to 1983. What I can say is that my team is thorough, but even if they were all made up, those stories have fully taken their place in the pantheon of Oregon lore. Now, no good serial killer, slash mummy, slash zombie, slash ghost is complete without a proper calling card. Hookhand has his hook left dangling from teen'ags carers s, Bigfoot leaves those classic giant footprints, and Bandageman? Well, he has his bandages, of course. In almost all of the stories, Bandagem leaves a little something of himself behind when he flees. That is a filthy, bloodied piece of bandage. Oh and we mustn't forget the smell either. It said that bandage man leaves the stench of rotting flesh in his wake, clinging to any lingering scraps of gauze. Which sounds lovely, right? And I always love a cautionary folktale, the kind of story designed to keep children from straying into the woods, or teenagers from making out in secret parking lots. And what kills the mood more than the perfume of rotting meat dripping from a mangled corpse, am I right? And yet, fictional as it may seem, it never hurts to be wary. If you find yourself driving down that long stretch of Highway 101 near Cannon Beach in Oregon, you might just want to keep an eye on your rearview mirror and a can of mummy proof spray in the glove box . Sometimes folklore works like an opposite version of the telephone game. And warped into fiction by repeating it over and over again, sometimes fiction can be passed along for so long that it feels exactly like the truth. It's a process that has happened countless times in the past, and in this digital age, I doubt it's going to stop. Urban legends, though, are almost always a reflection of the fears of the time. Of course, that doesn't mean people were once quite literally worried about a mummy coming into their suburb. It is, as it always has been, a bit more nuanced than that. Bandaged lumberjacks shuffled onto the scene of a small logging town when the newest generation wanted to look further afield for employment. Phantom buses showed up at a time when technology was developing too quickly to keep up. And bunny men, well, there's no real explanation for that one. It's just a story about a guy in a bunny suit. At the end of the day, though, most urban legends can act as little time capsules, each one preserving the fears of a prior generation. Fears that they then pass on to their children and grandchildren. Yes, they might tell a story about where we once were, but maybe, just maybe, they also tell a tale about where we're going. From bandaged men to bunny men, there sure are some weird characters out there . In fact, most urban legends involve some sort of mythological figurehead. Maybe in your town it's the old man who killed those teenagers out in the woods, or perhaps it's the ghostly hitchhiker who leaves behind a scarf or a sweater. But as one last story will show us, urban legends can also feature real people. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. 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