1. The homemade self-decapitation machine
The Legend: As humans, we’re pretty emotionally attached to our heads, which probably explains why there are so many urban legends that incorporate accidental or intentional decapitation. But if some guy around the water cooler were to insist that he once heard about a guy who committed suicide by beheading himself with a complicated saw-like booby trap device, you’d tag him as one of those people who can’t separate reality from fiction
Well, buckle up.
The Truth: Usually, when cops get a call about a domestic disturbance, it’s just another day at the office. You show up, make Cletus put his pants back on, confiscate the bath salts, the usual. Not for the poor guys who responded to a disturbance in Yorktown, Virginia, in 2011. For one thing, the guy they were there to help was sitting in a car with a trailer attached. A flaming trailer. For another, the guy in the car attached to the burning trailer refused to get out, not for the police or for the firemen.
And that’s when one of the fire-fighters noticed the wire around the driver’s neck … the wire that went out the back window and was snugly tied to a tree 10 feet away. This was no ordinary domestic disturbance. This dude wasn’t just a troubled soul having a freak-out at the trailer park; he was going out like the shiniest star in the crazy sphere.
Before anyone could stop him, the driver stepped on the gas, the car zoomed forward and the wire snapped. The unnamed victim was whipped out the rear window and his head was removed. And the whole ordeal wasn’t even over — the trailer detached from the truck and kept rolling, flames sky high in the air, head and body both left behind. Urban legends not so legendary, anymore, eh?
2. The engagement ring and the grave
The Legend: Getting buried alive happens so much in fiction that it comes up even more frequently in spooky campfire stories than anything else. The only things more implausible are the stories where the victims dig their way out (like in the second Kill Bill).
The Truth: A Polish man named Marcin Kasprzak decided that his girlfriend of six years, Michelina Lewandowska, wasn’t pretty enough for him. But instead of simply breaking up with her, he took a more terrifying and infinitely more complicated route. He and a buddy shot her with a Taser, taped her hands and feet, stuffed her in an old television box and loaded her up in the trunk of his car. Kasprzak and his friend then buried his fiancée alive in a secluded part of the woods and promptly withdrew 500 pounds with her ATM card.
Fortunately, Kasprzak was as bad at murder as he was good at buying jewellery. Lewandowska used her engagement ring to cut through the tape binding her and clawed her way to freedom through the dirt and branches that her boyfriend had buried her under. Ladies, let this be a lesson — make sure you get a nice, big, sharp diamond out of him. Especially if he has a television box he just doesn’t want to get rid of for some reason.
3. The very unhappy ending
The Legend: A man falls passionately in love with a beautiful, exciting woman. After a whirlwind romance, he permanently seals the deal with a wedding. It’s only then that he discovers that he has married THE DEVIL.
Wait, we’re going to say that there is such a thing as marrying a she-devil? Read on.
The Truth: Newlyweds Shriya and Bimal Patel had spent most of their first year as man and wife with him in Austin and her in Dubai. When they were finally reunited, Mr. Patel expected some romance to ensue when his wife offered to give him a hot oil massage in the bathtub. She even set the scene — romantic candles, a faint scent of gasoline …
The hopeless romantic was already in the tub when he realized that the oil she was pouring wasn’t so much oil as it was gas, and the candles weren’t there for ambience.
Shriya fled the scene, jamming the bathroom door on her way out. In other words, this wasn’t a spontaneous “douse my husband in gas and burn him alive” impulse that had hit her in the heat of the moment — she had planned it out to the last detail, and during the entire process never stopped to think that maybe there were easier ways to break it off. Shriya was, as you can imagine, charged with murder.
