Hope you weren’t planning on getting a good night’s sleep.
Welcome to WatchMojo UK and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 10
most terrifying British legends.
For this list, we’ll be taking a look at the most spine-tingling legends the British
Isles have to offer.
From well-documented ghostly apparitions to twisted tales of the macabre, we’ll be focusing
on spooky stories from around the UK that simply refuse to die.
While some of these stories may contain more truth than others, one thing’s for sure;
they’re all utterly terrifying.
First up is the tale of the Chained Oak, a popular local legend throughout the county
of Staffordshire.
After refusing a coin to an old beggar on his way home to Alton Towers, the miserly
Earl of Shrewsbury is cursed by the beggar, who declares that with every branch that falls
from the nearby oak tree, a member of his family will perish.
After the curse proves to be true, the Earl demands his servants chain up the old oak
to stop any further branches from falling.
The Chained Oak can still be visited in Alton today, and was the inspiration for the popular
ride ‘Hex’ at Alton Towers theme park.
Residents of Cannock Chase have been reporting sightings of these dark entities since the
early 1980s.
White as a sheet with pitch black eyes to match, the children can be found wandering
near wooded areas, often trying to lure in their would-be victims.
One of the more frequently sighted children is a young girl – known to cover her face
until passers-by get close enough for her to reveal her cavernous, black eyes, while
the local Four Crosses Inn has also seen a large amount of activity from the children.
After the locals of Highgate, London, began reporting a variety of supernatural sightings
in Highgate Cemetery and its surrounding areas, the site soon became a hotspot for enthusiasts
of the occult and paranormal.
As more and more sightings of grey spectres, ghouls and demonic entities continued to spread
across the community, rumours of a vampire buried at the cemetery began to take shape.
This whipped up a media firestorm, with locals blaming the vampire for the strange activity
taking place at the cemetery.
Public hysteria eventually culminated in a vampire hunt on Friday 13th March 1970.
Imagine driving on an empty country road in the middle of the night, when all of a sudden
you find your car jerked from left to right by a pair of disembodied hands clutching the
steering wheel.
Well, that’s exactly what the residents of Dartmoor claim happens on the B3212, a
stretch of road in Devon that’s seen an unusually high rate of vehicular accidents
over the years.
While many have supposedly perished at the hands of this entity, it’s the survivors
of these encounters that swear by their existence, keeping the unsettling legend alive.
Perhaps the most widely sighted cryptid in the whole of the UK, Black Shuck is an extremely
large canine creature, often said to be demonic - with fiery red eyes and an ominous black
mist that follows in its wake.
With sightings of a similar creature dating as far back as the early 12th century, Black
Shuck is a classic piece of British folklore.
The most famous recorded incident involving Black Shuck came in 1577, when it’s said
to have killed a man and child in a Suffolk church, collapsing the steeple and leaving
scorch marks in the process.
If you’re in the English countryside, stay clear of unattended bodies of water, otherwise
you may become the latest meal for the gruesome Jenny Greenteeth, a water-dwelling hag known
for pulling its victims – often children – into the depths of its watery lair.
With green skin, long black hair and razor-sharp teeth, Jenny Greenteeth inspired the creation
of Meg Mucklebones in Ridley Scott’s 1985 classic “Legend”.
Likely a folk tale devised to keep curious children away from unsafe waters, that doesn’t
change the fact that Jenny Greenteeth is utterly terrifying.
Although the London Underground has spawned many tales of ghostly goings-on and spectral
sightings in its 150-year history, one of the most frequently recurring spirits haunting
the Underground is the Crying Girl, who resides in King’s Cross Station.
After a fire killed 31 people in King’s Cross back in 1987, many people have reported
a lonely girl sobbing in the otherwise empty station, becoming intangible upon attempting
to console her.
Other encounters have been more subtle, with passengers claiming to hear her disembodied
weeping echo throughout the station, in addition to smelling smoke.
The Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset are supposedly home to the aptly named Wookey Hole Witch,
a crone said to have made a pact with the devil as a means of exacting vengeance upon
her unfaithful fiancé.
Not content with her revenge however, the witch continued to terrorise the citizens
of Wookey Hole for years to come.
A monk eventually managed to turn the witch to stone, and the resulting stalagmite has
since become a tourist attraction - with many believing it to be the petrified remains of
the dreaded witch.
Rumoured to be cursed after the brutal murder of a young couple took place on site, Epping
Forest’s suicide pool is one of the more mysterious places on this list.
With black, stagnant water and no visible sunlight, the pool supposedly radiates evil.
The most sinister thing about it however is its ability to draw in passers-by, which more
often than not results in their untimely suicide.
While the exact location of the pool isn’t known today, the bodies reportedly recovered
from Epping Forest over the past few hundred years speak for themselves.
Before we get to our top pick, here are a few honourable mentions:
When the tube was first built back in the mid-19th century, a combination of population
increase and underdeveloped hospital care resulted in a lot of dead bodies and nowhere
to store them.
This is where the legend of Whitechapel’s corpse train started, with residents of London
believing that there was a secret line installed on the tube that ferried bodies to empty sections
of the underground.
The existence of Whitechapel’s corpse train is still debated today, and may be partly
responsible for the plethora of ghostly tales tied to the tube.