When urban myths become chilling reality

We’re talking urban mythology today. True or half-true chillers, which are much more frightening than fiction because the events they describe have actually happened, or at least they are claimed to have actually happened. This is partly because in my new novel, STOLEN, out one month from now, DC Lucy Clayburn finds herself drawn into a nightmarish case entailing a series of atrocities, but only after she starts to investigate a local urban myth.

As that myth involves a mysterious black transit van, today is also an opportune time for us to look at some other creepy but supposedly true stories involving transport (both public and private). I’ll therefore be listing my ‘sinister seven’ spookiest of these, but will only be focussing on those that - as I’ve already said - could well have a kernel of truth in them.

And while we’re on the subject of genuine and terrible incidents on dark, urban streets, I’ll also be reviewing and discussing in my usual intricate detail Pat Barker’s nerve-numbing tale of serial murder in the heart of the inner city – a fictional case derived from all-too-real events – BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN.

If you’re only here for the Barker review, that’s fine as always. Just tootle on down to the lower end of today’s post. You’ll find it where my reviews usually are. However, if you’ve got a little more time on your hands, perhaps you’ll be interested first in …

The black van

Readers familiar with my Lucy Clayburn novels will know that she’s a detective constable with a chequered past who now works local CID in Crowley, Greater Manchester Police’s notorious November Division. It’s an ultra high crime district, so she is rarely short of difficult work to do and undergoes continual stress, none of which was helped by the revelation two books ago that her father, from who she has been estranged until very recently and never even knew as a child, is a highly placed gangster in Northwest England’s premier syndicate.

However, all Lucy’s previous cases, and all the angst they might have caused her, now pale to insignificance, because what she is about to uncover in STOLEN can only be described as true inner-city horror, and yet it all starts seemingly so innocently with a rumour – an urban myth, if you like – that a mysterious black transit van has been trawling the housing estates at night and is now being connected with a rash of pet abductions.

Yes, you heard it correctly. Dogs are going missing. So, it’s hardly a high priority for the local overworked and understaffed police force. They don’t even take it seriously. How do local folk know this weird black van is responsible for the missing dogs? Has anyone seen it happen? Does anyone even know if this black van is real? Isn’t it just a schoolyard story given undeserved credibility because of some recent unhappy coincidences?

But then, everything changes … when people also start to vanish.

First of all, it’s the homeless. Again, this is not easy for the police to investigate, because these unfortunates might not have disappeared, they could just have moved on. There are no bodies, no witnesses. There is no evidence of any assault or abduction. It’s another urban myth, isn’t it?

Until householders also begin disappearing. Initially it’s pensioners, but others who are younger and more able-bodied inevitably follow. And now, suddenly, there IS evidence. There is even evidence that a transit van may be involved.

To Lucy’s incredulity, she finds herself assigned to investigate what was previously a silly story, a child’s nightmare, a snippet of folklore. The problem is that she and the rest of the police are late to this game. It may already be the case that something truly horrible is well underway on the November Division.

As I say, STOLEN is out one month from now, May 16 to be exact, from all decent retailers ... 

Kernels of truth

Okay, so while we’re on the subject of modern mythology, here, as promised, are the seven weirdest and scariest ‘true’ vehicular stories that I’ve ever heard. As I say, though, I’ve only picked stories that could and may have a grain of genuine truth inside them. So, this is not just a bunch of urban legends. Don’t be looking here for the vanishing hitchhiker, the axe-murderer in the back seat, or the boyfriend’s head being banged on top of the broken-down car. The stories I’ve chosen here are not apocryphal. They could have happened, and maybe – according to the evidence in some cases – they actually did. 

Here we go …

The People in the Wood

Thousands of folk vanish in the developed world every year and often in circumstances that are suspicious. It’s a frightening stat, and one that allows for all kinds of fanciful theories. One timelessly popular one seems to be that cults and covens exist beyond the veil of society, who are dedicated to doing evil (usually murder) and, somehow or other, remain protected from law enforcement. One myth circulating in the US for decades held that such groups would stage accidents on lonely roads late at night, and when a car stopped, leap out and grab the helpful motorist as their next victim.

As I say, fanciful. Except that recently in Floyd County, Georgia, something similar happened to a sheriff’s deputy. Patrolling a nighttime woodland area, he saw a body on the road get up and run out of sight. When he stopped his cruiser and got out, a group of masked, club-wielding figures emerged from the trees. Only by holding them at gunpoint was he able to retreat and drive away. A later search of the woods by fellow officers failed to locate anyone. His department suspected that the ‘body’ had been intended to trap a civilian but had fled at the sight of a police car.

The Black Volga

An eerie legend of Eastern Europe during the Soviet era concerned a black Volga allegedly being driven around the backstreets of cities in Poland and Hungary, looking to abduct young women and children. The Volga was a handsome vehicle, unaffordable to most ordinary citizens in Eastern Europe at that time, and so was primarily used by Soviet officials. This fed into the rumour that the Communist elite was snatching young people to use them as sex-slaves, or for other nefarious reasons, such as to harvest their healthy organs or even drain their blood in an effort to find a miracle cure for leukemia.

The story might have had a basis in truth as many people disappeared under the Soviet regime never to be seen again, and a number were taken away in government-owned black Volgas. Needless to say, the myth grew with the telling, the vehicle soon adopting white curtains and wheel-trims, which gave it a vampire-like vibe, and even after the Soviet days had ended, seeing itself reinvented as part of a Satanist conspiracy myth, the cultists involved having sprayed it blood-red and replaced its wing-mirrors with horns.

The Old Woman

A famously chilling myth took on an especially scary resonance in Northern England during the late 1970s. It held that a nurse, at the end of a late shift, was driving along a moorland road in pouring rain when she spied an old woman waiting alone at a bus stop. Knowing that no bus was coming this late, the nurse stopped her car and offered a lift. However, not long later, the nurse became uneasy. The old woman had a sour disposition and when she lit a cigarette, the flare of the match exposed hairy ‘apelike’ hands. Stopping the car, the nurse fooled her passenger into stepping out and checking on the headlights, at which point she promptly drove away.

Later, on realising the old woman had left her handbag in the car, the nurse felt guilty and went to a police station, only for the police to open the bag and find that it contained nothing but a meat cleaver. Inevitably, the old woman was looked for but never found. In the late ’70s, the Yorkshire Ripper was terrorising that part of the world, and the West Yorkshire Police allegedly investigated one version of this story which supposedly had taken place on the Leeds to Tadcaster road.   

The Vanishing

The disappearance of Brandon Swanson may sound like an urban myth, but unfortunately, it’s 100% true. It was in 2008, and Swanson, a student at Minnesota West Community College, had just completed his spring semester. He was driving home late at night, when, lost on a backroad, he ran into a ditch. With his car immobilised, he called his family. Unable to give his exact whereabouts, he told them that he thought he was close to the city of Lynd. Swanson’s parents came to collect him, and to help pinpoint him, continued to chat with him on the phone.

Once they were roughly in the right area, they started flashing their headlights, instructing their son to do the same. However, neither party saw another car flashing, which led both to believe that Swanson was not where he’d thought he was. Swanson thus opted to walk towards Lynd, believing he could see the lights of its outskirts. His parents continued to talk to him on the phone, but at around 2.30am, he suddenly shouted: ‘Oh shit!’ The line went dead and that was it: Brandon Swanson was never heard from again. Police located his car the following day, some 25 miles from Lynd, but there was no trace of the young man and no indication what might have happened to him, despite extensive use of search and cadaver dogs. The case remains open, and foul play is suspected.

The Never-Ending Road

An eerie story from Southern California holds that Lester Road, which leads through the mountains near the city of Corona, would occasionally adopt a supernatural dimension, and run on endlessly, leading to nowhere and taking all motorists unfortunate enough to be using it at the time into oblivion. At first, this sounds like a typical urban legend of the internet era, especially as it is most often to be found on ‘Creepypasta’ websites. But if only it was that simple.

There is no Lester Road in the vicinity of Corona today, but there is a Lester Avenue, though this latter has a suburban nature and it seems unlikely that one could be mistaken for the other. However, one possible explanation for the story lies in an unproven tale that, some time in the recent past, a road repair team were assessing a track through the nearby mountains and discovered a hairpin bend and a sheer drop, which, when approached from a certain direction and at a certain time of day (the lighting would be an issue) created the illusion that the road continued straight on. Reports that the team found many car wrecks and dead bodies at the foot of the drop have not been verified. 

  

The Child’s Voice

This story is odd in that it initially appeared to be true, only for questions to be raised later. On August 7, 1973, a child calling himself Larry made contact with truckers in New Mexico using CB radio, crying that his father’s pickup had crashed into a ravine, that his father was now dead and that he could not get out. A major search followed, but it proved impossible to get sense out of the boy. Occasionally his signal faded, but at other times it was picked up in locations as distant as California, Wyoming and even Canada. A helicopter pilot searching the Manzano Mountains, in New Mexico, thought that he was getting close, only to find that the child he was talking to was called David (who he also then failed to locate). When an ex-military searcher made contact with the boy on his high-powered radio set, they spoke for three hours, but Larry remained hesitant to give useful info.

After a week, the boy ceased transmitting, and when police established that no persons called Larry (or David) had been reported missing since Aug 7, the search was called off. Searchers who’d spoken to the child were distressed by this, convinced that the child had been in genuine terror and that it hadn’t been a hoax, but still ‘Larry’ has never been traced. It remains a singular and eerie mystery.

The Dead Body Train

London’s Underground is well-known to be haunted, but the scariest story connected with the ‘the Tube’ is that of the so-called ‘Dead Body Train’. Myths tell that a tunnel closed to public traffic once ran from the Royal London Hospital to a destination unknown, passing only one regular station en route, Whitechapel, but never stopping there ... because its passengers were corpses, hundreds of them stacked in cheap coffins. It sounds outrageous, and of course the authorities deny it, but many old employees on the Underground insist that the story is true.

But what on Earth was it? The mysterious transport has allegedly been out of service since 1900, so it could not have been used to deliver WW2 bombing casualties to hastily-built crematoria or even Spanish Flu victims during the pandemic after WW1.

No official document records the existence of this macabre vehicle, and there is no physical evidence … except a curious bricked-up tunnel at Whitechapel Underground Station, which leads in the direction of the Royal London Hospital, but which no one seems able to explain. The kernel of truth in this tale may lie in the story that bodies were once briefly stored at Whitechapel when the Royal London became overcrowded, and that in Victorian times, the London Necropolis Railway ran funeral trains overground to out-of-town cemeteries. The spooky legend persists though, and the Dead Body Train can still supposedly be heard running through tunnels that no longer exist.

  

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …

An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.

BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN 
by Pat Barker (1983)

Outline

In an industrial city in the Northeast of England in the early 1980s, not long after the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper, another serial killer is on the loose, a faceless assailant who is slowly working his way through the town’s prostitutes, beating and strangling them, and then hacking them to death with a butcher’s knife.

There is a degree of panic on the streets, but it’s probably not as great as it would be were the victims not sex-workers. Likewise, while the police flood the district with detectives and undercover officers, they make little headway and adopt a distinctly unimaginative approach, waiting and watching from cars on the off-chance the killer will strike again, in other words using the street-walkers as living bait.

In the midst of this horror, a young mother in the neighbourhood, Brenda, is gradually descending into prostitution.

Abandoned by her waster husband with three children to feed and colossal debts to pay, she tries at first to get herself an honest job at what is referred to as the ‘Chicken Factory’, a hideous relic of the industrial past, where the birds, which come in alive, are killed, plucked, gutted and packed for sale (a fairly blunt simile for the working-girls themselves). The work is hard, slimy and sickening, grease covering everything, even getting into the tea, the floors swimming with blood and feathers.  

Brenda tries to stick it out but can’t, especially when she learns that the child-minder looking after her children is abusing them, which means that she must care for them herself during the day (so there goes the job, whether she likes it or not). With nothing else for it – the charity and assistance of neighours will only go so far – she finally takes to the streets.

This, of course, brings whole new degree of grimness to her life: not just the terror of standing in the shadows under the viaduct, knowing that other girls have died nearby, but also having to engage in lewd acts with all kinds of brutish, boorish men, learning to loath both them and herself in the process. It doesn’t even end when a more experienced fellow-prostitute, Kath, offers to show her the ropes. Kath is kind but has many problems of her own, including alcoholism and terrible judgement. Part One of the narrative ends in the most horrific circumstances, Kath falling foul of the prowling killer, being lured into a derelict house and there dying in the most graphic, ghastly and sexually explicit way, but only after the murderer – who remains anonymous in the cloying darkness of the nighttime backstreets – reveals himself to be an impotent nonentity.

Despite this, life for the other prostitutes goes on. Brenda is now part of a close-knit clique, who find comfort in each other’s company, especially when they’re in the pub together, and do the best they can to look out for each other when they’re on the street – even if there is now a new air of fear and despair, the sad face of Kath looking down at them all from billboards and posters.

One of them, Jean, responds slightly differently. Another of the killer’s recent victims, Carol, was her part-time lover, and she takes this loss so personally that she determines to get even with the madman herself. She thus goes out, working the streets alone, hoping that she’ll encounter him, and as she’s secretly armed, fully intending to kill him when he attacks her.

But Blow Your House Down is not a crime novel in the traditional sense, and Pat Barker did not write it to be a melodramatic revenge thriller. It’s very much a slice of brutal authenticity, strongly influenced by the dark tragedy that was the real-life Yorkshire Ripper case, in which the victims turned out to be tired and weary mothers, often struggling for money, rather than the tawdry glamour-pusses we see in the movies, and the villain a pathetic, inadequate nobody rather than some monstrous murdering devil like Hannibal Lecter or Leatherface (and in which, as also happens later in this novel, women were struck down who were not sex-workers, and whose lives and the lives of whose families were devastated as a result). 

As such, for all Jean’s courage, attempting to take the law into her own hands is never going to end well. Blood may well flow, but whose is it likely to be? …

Review

Blow Your House Down was Pat Parker’s second novel, published ten years after the very successful Union Street, which also examined the difficult lives of working-class women in the industrial North of England. Inevitably, the fact that there’s a maniac on the loose changes the tone of this second book, but it’s important to reiterate that Blow Your House Down is not a murder mystery. It’s not a story about a serial killer, and it’s certain not about those charged with catching him. Even Jean, the prostitute determined to get vengeance, is a sad, forlorn figure, who displays little heroism and almost no common sense at all as she undertakes her dangerous quest.

What’s it really about is the women themselves, the victims and the would-be victims, and when you think about it, that’s incredibly refreshing as, so often in books like this we walk with the killer and wallow in his madness, or focus on the cops, feeling every inch of their stress as they struggle to bring in their man, while the victims are treated like faceless slabs of meat.

Blow Your House Down turns all that on its head.

The police, on the few occasions they appear, are shadowy, ambiguous figures, who offer no comfort or reassurance to the street-women, while, though on occasion we do see things from the killer’s perspective – in that scene, for example, which comes straight out of such gritty cinema classics as Psycho, Frenzy or The Boston Strangler – most of the time he’s in the background, little more than a rumour, an urban myth. Instead, for much of the narrative, the fear is caused by other men; not just the layabout boyfriends and drunken, violent husbands (though they do their bit to make the women’s lives even more arduous, one husband, Bill, becoming a police suspect for a time, which destroys his wife’s life in a way that the terrible injuries she survives never could), but the other guys who approach them in the darkness under the viaduct, or behind billboards bearing pictures of the dead, to offer money for sordid encounters – at least, the women hope they’re going to be sordid encounters, and not something a thousand times worse.

What an existence, you may think.

And you’re right. Because even in the more cheerful scenes, when the women gather to joke and drown their sorrows in The Palmerston, a pub in the heart of the red-light district, it’s always undermined by a sense of slow-burning dread, because – though there is a degree of bravado about it – both we and they know that they’re going to have to go out again shortly, and the fear factor is high.

So far so good. In fact, so far so excellent. The book makes for an intense and compelling read. But in character terms, the critics have been more circumspect.

The prostitutes' sorority is strong. They have to look out for each other, because nobody else will. These are people who have nothing, except their kids and each other, and all the while a killer is relentlessly hunting them. But this sisterly closeness is their group response to the crisis. Individually, they’re ghosts. They almost blend into one. You could assume that this is because all uniqueness has been hammered out of them by hardship. However, some readers have criticised Blow Your House Down for not stamping the women with stronger personalities. It’s possible to see them as having been individuals once, even if they aren’t any longer. But whatever the author’s aim, it’s undeniable that none of the characters really shows much depth.

 

However, if Pat Barker stints on deep character development, one thing she never holds back on is grimness. It would be easier, for the sake of taste and decency, for the author to gloss over the dirty details of this seedy world, but that is not what she’s about here. The dialogue is thick with vernacular and four-letter words. The sex scenes are strictly ‘wham slam thank-you, mam!’, minus romance or even eroticism, while, more often or not, the men are so nervous and embarrassed that they can’t even manage to make them about lust. The sites of these trysts are always backstreets and factory yards, amid filth, beer cans and used condoms.

The murder of Kath, as already mentioned, is one of the most distressing that I’ve ever seen on the written page and is purposely prolonged so that the reader isn’t spared one half-second, and because we are in the murderer’s mind while it happens, we are completely unmoved by any of that. It’s a simple, brutal act, which we perform for our own gratification, and the object of our rage might as well be a lifeless mannequin.

If none of this is enough, Pat Barker reflects the localties where these things happen in vivid detail. The Chicken Factory is a blood-spattered hellhole; the pub – The Palmerston – though noisy and crowded, is a classic example of those dingy street-corner boozers, filled with smoke and often volatile in mood; even the streets themselves are unforgiving. I served as a copper in the Manchester badlands in the 1980s, and lived all through the Yorkshire Ripper rampage, and can honestly say that Pat Barker completely captures the atmosphere of that dreary, post-industrial time when mills were empty shells, houses stood in boarded-up in rows, and everything looked as if it was shortly to be demolished.

Not everything about Blow Your House Down is considered to be perfect. The final sequence, which follows the fortunes of Maggie, a local factory-worker rather than a prostitute, who survives a savage attack that could conceivably be the work of the same killer, has been described as ‘odd’ and ‘out of place’. Though it is clearly intended to bridge the gap between the nocturnal world of sex-workers and the ordinary life of everyday folk, implying that the threat of random violence is to be dreaded across the board, especially when the victims are only chosen out of convenience, it maybe jars a little, and I can understand how it doesn’t provide a satisfactory conclusion to the narrative for everyone (especially if they were expecting the killer to be caught in a definitive, clear-cut way).

However, Blow Your House Down remains a remarkable and thought-provoking little book – it only clocks in at 176 pages – and provides an affecting, highly authentic and at times completely shocking read. Okay, it doesn’t really constitute a traditional thriller, but that was never the intention, and even though I’m a thriller fan, I found myself thinking about it for days and days after I’d finished reading. That makes it a winner for me and one that I have no hesitation in recommending to all fans of uber-dark fiction.  

As always, I’m now going to chip in with my recommendations for a cast should Blow Your House Down ever make it onto TV or film. Who knows whether this will ever happen? I’d love it to, though it would make for tough viewing, let me tell you. Anyway, even though I doubt any casting director would ever listen to me, here we go:

Brenda – Joanne Froggatt

Jean – Eve Myles

Kath – Claire Foy

Maggie – Helen McCrory

Bill – Ian Beattie