QUESTION: What local rumor or legend do you remember hearing growing up?
The Water Cooler – What Local Rumor Or Legend Do You Remember Hearing Growing Up?
© Copyright 2007 – 2025 Claycord News & Talk
QUESTION: What local rumor or legend do you remember hearing growing up?
© Copyright 2007 – 2025 Claycord News & Talk
Things disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle!!!! People offering me drugs (DARE) and Quicksand
The Soviets will drop the atomic bomb and wipe us all out unless we built a fallout shelter in
our backyard. Well, we didn’t build a fallout shelter, and the Soviets never attacked us.
Thank goodness I had a dad with common sense and could see right through the political BS.
Another legend was that Santa won’t bring any presents if I’m a bad boy. I got presents every year, so I must have I had him fooled.
Selling air raid shelters was the Green New Deal of the time.
Google the above sentence exactly and read the AI driven response.
These are some spooky times.
Black Bart….also the White Whitch of Kirker Pass Road
I thought the White Witch was a Nortonville ghost…
When I was a youngster I do remember being in Rose Hill Cemetery late on a cloudy, windy night with a full moon and the way the shadows moved across the ground…spooky!
Good thing there were about 20 of us up there drinking beer, I would not go if there wasn’t a crowd… and beer… and girls (I’m not one of those sausage party guys).
I remember the poltergeist house in Clayton (it’s still there… the house that is, I’m not sure where the poltergeist might be) That story was pretty well documented too!
Yup, the White Witch goes back to at least the 70’s – known to haunt the hills of Mt Diablo, she was vengeful against young men that pressured the chastity of young ladies.
Apparently the White Witch got around. She was also ‘legend’ in the Skyline Park woods above Oakland. 😉
That I would eventually go blind and grow hair on my palms.
Legend – JFK was assassinated by a single miracle bullet (that mysteriously defied deformation other than the lands & grooves from the rifling)
I’ve found plenty of those at the rifle range, but those just went into soft dirt and had not hit any large rocks (or bone). I’ve found plenty that were really smooshed too.
This is the magic bullet that went through bone, (JFK’s skull), richocheted inside a vehicle, and then struck another person and came through completely unscathed – yeah right
Yeah VP Johnson got away with murder on that incident.
I remember a pizza joint in Lafayette in the mid 70s maybe early 80s supposedly if you went and had a certain kind of pizza and were pregnant you would go into labor.
Skipolini’s in Clayton
Skips used to be great back in the day with the sawdust floors but you couldn’t pay me to go in there now have one of their $80 pizzas.
Gravity Hill…which was somewhere near Morgan Territory road I think? I’m sure there’s different variations of the story, but the way I heard the story was that a school bus full of elementary students crashed and many kids died…so when you put your car into neutral on Gravity Hill and started “rolling uphill,” it was really the ghosts of the children pushing you to safety? Something like that. I would also hear of people putting baby powder on their back bumpers to see if there would be any children’s fingerprints afterwards. I remember going out that way a few times with a group of friends, and the rolling car in neutral thing did seem to work from what I remember…anybody else go out there in high school?
Side note to the story…if you look up Yuba City bus disaster on Wikipedia, this is probably where the local lore came from…
The Yuba City bus rollover was southbound 680 taking the Marina Vista exit. Lot of kids died in that.
I can’t imagine why a school bus ever would have been on Empire mine road in the first place.
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https://eastcountytoday.net/east-contra-costa-countys-spooky-places/
The claim that If Richard Nixon was elected Governor of California in 1962 there will be school on Saturdays….Turns out that this was a nationwide rumor, used against Republicans, with Bobby Kennedy filmed in 1966 telling school children…”If the Republicans win there will be school on Saturdays”.
Purple People and the supposed cult in the monastery up behind Danville.