thumb|upright=1.5|The [[Bunny Man Bridge, location of a 1970s urban legend about a man in a rabbit costume threatening people with an axe]]

Legend tripping is a practice in which a usually furtive nocturnal pilgrimage is made to a site which is alleged to have been the scene of some tragic, horrific, and possibly supernatural event or haunting. The practice involves the visiting of sites endemic to locations identified in local urban legends, and can serve as a rite of passage. Legend tripping has been documented most thoroughly to date in the United States.

Sites for legend trips

While the stories that attach to the sites of legend tripping vary from place to place, and sometimes contain a kernel of historical truth, there are a number of motifs and recurring themes in the legends and the sites. Abandoned buildings, remote bridges, tunnels, caves, rural roads, specific woods or other uninhabited (or semi-uninhabited) areas, and especially cemeteries are frequent sites of legend-tripping pilgrimages.

Reactions and controversies

thumb|upright=1.20|Pope Lick Trestle in [[Louisville, Kentucky, the reputed home of the Pope Lick Monster ]]

Legend-tripping is a mostly harmless, perhaps even beneficial, youth recreation. It allows young people to demonstrate their courage in a place where the actual physical risk is likely slight. However, in what Ellis calls "ostensive abuse," the rituals enacted at the legend-tripping sites sometimes involve trespassing, vandalism, and other misdemeanors, and sometimes acts of animal sacrifice or other blood ritual. These transgressions then sometimes lead to local moral panics that involve adults in the community, and sometimes even the mass media. These panics often further embellish the prestige of the legend trip to the adolescent mind. The panic over youth Satanism in the 1980s was fueled in part by graffiti and other ritual activities engaged in by legend-tripping youths.

  • Bachelor's Grove Cemetery, outside of Chicago, Cook County, Illinois
  • The Black Agnes statue, formerly in Pikesville, Maryland and now in Washington, DC
  • Bunny Man Bridge near Clifton, Virginia
  • Crawford Road in Yorktown, Virginia
  • Goat Man's Grave near Rolla, Missouri.
  • Hexenkopf Rock in Williams Township, Pennsylvania

thumb|upright=1.20|Bachelor's Grove cemetery (in [[infrared) ]]

  • The Hornet Spook Light twelve miles southwest of Joplin, Missouri
  • The Lake View Public School, also known as the Gore Orphanage, near Cleveland, Ohio
  • McHarry, Captain Frances burial spot in Harrison County, Indiana
  • The Myrtle Hill Cemetery in Medina County, Ohio
  • Ong's Hat, New Jersey
  • Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago, Illinois and its Fire Memorial in nearby Queen of Heaven Cemetery.
  • Stull Cemetery in Stull, Kansas, claimed to be a "gateway to Hell"
  • Waverly Hills Sanatorium, an abandoned hospital for tuberculosis victims, in Louisville, Kentucky

See also

  • Bloody Mary (folklore)
  • Ghost hunting
  • Haunted house
  • Kimodameshi
  • Stand by Me (film)
  • The Devil's Chair (urban legend)
  • Lilly E. Gray
  • Emo’s Grave

References

Further reading

  • Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live, by Bill Ellis (2001)
  • Encyclopedia of Haunted Indiana, Kobrowski, Nicole, 2008.
  • Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook. Logan: Utah State University Press; McNeill, Lynne S. and Elizabeth Tucker, eds.; 2018.
  • Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat, Michael Kinsella, (2011)
  • "Legend Tripping: The Ultimate Family Experience, Robinson, Robert C., 2014.
  • Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture, by Bill Ellis (2004)
  • Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media, by Bill Ellis (2000)
  • What's in a coin? Reading the Material Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities (2007), by Donald H. Holly and Casey E. Cordy. The Journal of American Folklore 120 (477):335-354.
  • Debies-Carl, Jeffrey S. If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. 312 pages.