(This is Part 6 of a series I will continue to bring you each week or two)

(I’m not going to try to debunk or confirm Urban Legends. I just want to talk about them. The whole idea of most Urban Legends are creepy and feed upon the mind. They make you wonder IF that could happen or have happened sometime. Some are ridiculous, but there are an insurmountable amount of unexplained things in the universe. I do believe anything is possible. I believe in Bigfoot, Nessie, UFOs, and ghosts. I know in my heart of hearts there are phenomena that are unexplained and those that scientists do their damnedest to explain. Science has studied and debunked many things that people still believe to be true, no matter what, and have to be hit with a sledgehammer to believe what they are told. I am one of those people. Now, as I said at the beginning, Urban Legends are just the IDEA of something being true. Our own minds play worse tricks on us than our eyes. Trust me, my mind fucks with me more than I should let it. But, you know what? I love that. It sure as hell keeps me thinking. I hope you enjoy Urban Legends: Killer in the Backseat)

The title of this particular urban legend is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. I first heard of this story upon watching the movie some of these legends helped create. I will get to it later. For now, I want to say that for some odd reason, I have always checked my backseat (or back of the truck if that’s what I was driving at the time) for any signs of disturbing beings lurking. Call me a chickenshit, but this is something I have done since before learning of the urban legend that tries to teach us all to be aware of our surroundings at all times. I had actually heard of friends of friends of friends telling tales of a person parking their vehicle for a few moments to quickly run to an ATM, in a store, or yes, get gas, and leaving the vehicle unlocked. At the person’s time of vacating, a drunk – who had been stumbling around the parking lot – decides he or she needs to lay down on something soft, and enters the car or truck to get warm and catch a snooze. Again, an urban legend in the town I grew up in. Imagine how scary it would be to be driving down the road and you hear a snore, or feel movement, or somebody sits up abruptly right into your line of vision in the rear-view mirror? The likelihood of your chances of an accident increase tenfold, let alone the half heart attack one might have, as said person sitting up decided to blow chunks all over your windshield. Do I lock my doors any more often because of this? Not anymore. Do I check my back seat because of this? Not AS much. I am more confident in my abilities to do what it takes to protect myself and my family. But, the idea of it still lurks – still lurks like a possible escaped murderer waiting for that right time to take advantage of a man who might be just a little bit too comfortable in his abilities…

The aforementioned movie I spoke of is called “Urban Legend”. It was made in 1998, and the first scene of the movie was created based on this “legend” to start the audience in thinking of the worst scenarios that were laid out throughout the film. In the film, an actress, who obviously auditioned for the movie and was chosen to die first, is at a gas station filling up. The creepy, little, stuttering gas station attendant notices something and tries to lure the girl into the office saying there is a problem with her credit card. She immediately and mistakenly looks at him as the one wanting to do harm and leaves the gas station in a rush with the attendant chasing after her yelling, “There is someone in the back seat!!!” The character gets an axe to the head. So sad. This small twist on the original legend is a good one. In the actual story, the attendant and the girl call the police, who show up and arrest a man who had escaped the loony bin and/or prison. Upon studying the variations on the Killer in the Backseat urban legend, an interesting one came up that really did not give a whole lot of details. It just mentioned that a woman stops when she sees a doll on the side of a road in the moors (obviously a British twist), stops, and the killer jumps in the back at that time. I guess staying away from the moors and on the roads doesn’t always work, especially if the roads are in the moors. I suppose the most plausible version is that of being followed all the way home by a mysterious car, whose driver tends to keep flashing the brights. After a night out with the girls, a woman is driving down the lonely, two-lane highway toward home. As she tops a hill, a set of headlight start to shine from around the corner she just took a few minutes earlier. She is cruising along, when the headlights are a lot closer. A minute later, and the car is upon her. She sits up in her chair, tightens her grip on the steering wheel, and looks in her side mirror, only to see a blinker and the vehicle getting into the other lane. It starts rolling up on her quarter panel, then slams on its brakes and is immediately back behind her. The brights come on, and the car inches closer – at times lightly bumping her. Sometimes the dims come back on, then the brights again. She speeds up, slows down, but the car is always attached to her like a spider’s web that one cannot quite get rid of. She tears ass into her driveway, throws it into park, and practically flies out of her vehicle. As she is running into the house, a man gets out of his vehicle and yells, “Call the police now! Lock your doors!” Upon arrival of the police, the lady emerges from her house only to find out that the man in the vehicle following her was trying to warn her. As he went to pass her on the highway, he had seen a man in the backseat with a butcher knife raising it, so he merged as quickly as possibly behind her and flashed his lights, which made the murderer/rapist in the backseat duck time and time again. Small variations have been brought in, such as a husband that emerges from the house and that it is not always a butcher knife as the weapon.

Many have said that this is actually one of the most sexist and racially negative urban legends ever. The person in trouble is ALWAYS a woman, the killer or rapist is ALWAYS a man, and the person trying to warn the woman is always a man. Why does sex or race even fucking matter here? It doesn’t. I could give a royal shit if it is a man or woman hiding out in my backseat; I don’t care what race of person is there either. If a person aims to kill me while I’m driving, it is always going to be the intent of that person that scares me most, not what they look like. That’s it. I’m checking my backseat all the time again. He or she will have to kill me out in the damn open.

(An Urban Legend plays with the mind and makes one wonder. Hope you enjoyed reading “Killer in the Backseat” as much as I enjoyed writing it. In my last Urban Legends article, I saved this particular section for a little rant at how feasible that particular urban is in the world today. Well, I guess I need to repeat the fact that any of these scenarios in this story are probably twice as much as likely to happen than anything else otherwise. Think about it. How easy would it be to scare the hell out of a person driving alone down a deserted highway? Have there really been no reports of ANYTHING like this happening? I believe in the first question, not so much in the second one. The likelihood of this one coming to fruition scares the hell right out of me. I guess that could be a good thing, but I do not want to find out. So, I’m locking my doors and will be keeping an eye on the backseat from now on. How ’bout you? If you’re not, and I find out…)

 Please check out the other stories in this series by typing  Urban Legends in the search bar on the homepage. THANKS!!!