SHE may be young and beautiful, but Sydney has a sinister side, with a stack of urban legends revealing the dark and twisted minds of her inhabitants.

From bodies in the bridge to angry apparitions stalking our roads, these cracking yarns get better with each retelling. And whether true or false, we think they’re ten of the best.

Do you know a good urban legend? Tell us in the comments section below

1. BODIES IN THE BRIDGE

Building the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a dangerous business with 16 official deaths recorded — and three more mysteriously hushed up, according to this urban legend.

The tale goes that during construction, three contractors fell into the huge pylons and being itinerant workers, their disappearance wasn’t noticed for weeks.

The legend goes that their bodies were too difficult to retrieve and they remain entombed in the pylons today.

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media_camera The 89m high concrete pylons, faced with granite, stand at either end of the Harbour Bridge.

2. A DEVIL AMONG US

This one’s a spinechiller. While waiting at Circular Quay for a ferry to take them to Sydney’s Luna Park on June 9, 1979, the Godson family was approached by a Satanic-looking figure dressed in a loin cloth and wearing a mask and a horned headdress.

The creature silently placed his hand on six-year-old Damien’s shoulder and somebody took a photograph.

MYSTERY OF THE DEVIL-HORNED MAN

It was the last ever taken of the boy who hours later died with his four-year-old brother Craig and father John on the Luna Park Ghost Train. Six children and one adult were killed when fire ripped through the ride at 10pm that night.

Conspiracy theories sprang up, but nobody ever saw the bizarre character again.

MY WHOLE FAMILY DIED IN THE LUNA PARK BLAZE

media_camera The 1979 photograph of the masked man taken at Circular Quay.

media_camera Firemen at the scene of Ghost Train ride fire that killed Damien, Craig and John Godson and four othes in June 1979.

3. MYSTICAL BIG CATS

Something evil has been stalking the western suburbs and Blue Mountains for close to 80 years. Reports of big cats that shred livestock and kill pets have been around since the 1930s, with at least 600 reported sightings in the past two decades alone.

IT’S OFFICIAL: THE PHANTOM BIG CAT IS BACK

While the puma-sized creatures proved elusive during several government inquiries, theories abound as to what they might be.

Some say they are a secret “marsupial cat” yet to be classified, others suggest escaped circus animals that have mutated into giant feline killers. The truth is out there. Somewhere.

media_camera The mythical panther, said to roam Penrith, the Hawkesbury, Lithgow and Blue Mountains for a number of years. Picture: Channel 9

4. WHAT LIES BENEATH

A secret subterranean world exists beneath Sydney where smuggling, kidnapping and other murky activities have been going on since Colonial times.

In Millers Point, there are persistent rumours of underground tunnels connecting pubs to the waterfront, including the convict-built Hero of Waterloo hotel, where a drunk punter could easily find himself ‘shanghaied’ only to wake up.

media_camera Hero of Waterloo pub where secret tunnels were used for smuggling rum and unwilling sailors.

media_camera The shaft of the old tunnel in the cellar at The Hero of Waterloo, Walsh Bay. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Then there’s Lake St James, a mysterious underground water body below the Macquarie St station, where albino eels are said to lurk and secret military training ops are held in the darkness for weeks on end. Apparently.

The city is indeed riddled with tunnels as a result of early rail construction, and the lake part is at least true, although it’s not quite as mystical as you’d hope.

media_camera Lake St James is 1km long and up to 5m deep in some places, but whether life exists is another matter ... media_camera Many parts of the CBD in Sydney are riddled with tunnels, including below Hyde Park, as a result of early railway construction.

5. THE GIRL ON THE HIGHWAY

Known as one of the spookiest roads in Australia, there are countless stories that speak of a girl in a white dress who appears on the Wakehurst Parkway near Middle Creek Bridge .

One version shared on Reddit involves a young girl called Kelly who used to appear in people’s cars just before the lights at Oxford Falls.

If they were travelling alone after midnight, she would take control of the car unless ordered to get out.

This urban legend hasn’t waned over the years, and a film crew recently made a documentary about the story which was apparently so harrowing, several crew members became physically ill during the experience.

media_camera Wakehurst Parkway on the northern beaches has been creeping motorists out for years.

6. HAWKESBURY RIVER MONSTER

It’s depicted as having a snake-like head, long neck, large body and two sets of flippers with an eel-like tail. Ring a bell? Yep, it’s Nessie reborn in the Hawkesbury River.

DOES A PREHISTORIC CREATURE HAUNT THE HAWKESBURY RIVER

This urban myth has rolled through the decades, getting more elaborate as the years go by.

From reports of unexplained slide marks on the riverbanks, to crushed and abandoned boats whose owners have vanished, some even say the mystery goes back to the Darug people of the region who depicted the water monster in their art.

media_camera Sightings of an unknown water creature in the Hawkesbury River continue to occur.

7. SECRET MILITARY BUNKER

During World War II, Bankstown was a hub of military activity as the airport was home to several fighter units.

As a result, the military set up loads of “dummy houses” to make the airport look like a farm, and built several secret bunkers underground where training, plotting, and other covert operations took place.

Several of the bunkers are public knowledge but one continues to elude conspiracy theorists. Rumoured to house military secrets, it is said to lie untouched beneath a block of flats in the area, its steel doors welded shut. Some intrepid explorers claim to have snuck inside in the 1980s to find a vast, Indiana-Jones-style complex with tunnels connecting to a secret military headquarters nearby.

media_camera From 1945 to 1947, this bunker in Bankstown was used as a covert Royal Australian Air Force base. It is now buried under a public park which lies at the end of Taylor St.

8. THE BLACK GHOST OF THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

A black clad female apparition has been stalking Victoria Pass for more than a century with truckies still reporting sightings of the woman on the descent from Mt Victoria to Little Hartley on the current Great Western Highway.

The woman is said to be the ghost of child bride Caroline Collett, beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend John Walsh in 1842 and left to spend an eternity of cold nights haunting travellers.

The road has been upgraded and widened since the original was built by convicts in the 1830s, but she is said to still puts in an occasional appearance for motorists, usually on the coldest of nights when black ice forces drivers to slow down.

media_camera The ghost of Victoria Pass is the subject of an 1891 Henry Lawson poem, in which he wrote: ‘You’d call the man a senseless fool, a blockhead or an ass, who’d dare to say he saw the ghost of Mount Victoria Pass’.

9. SYDNEY’S FOUNDATIONAL ORGY

This is one of Sydney’s oldest urban legends and certainly the most salacious. In fact, like Chinese whispers, it has evolved into quite an extraordinary myth, according to the Dictionary of Sydney, which has researched its evolution. The story goes that when the first convict women came ashore in Sydney on February 6, 1788, the male convicts were beside themselves with joy and after much rum was consumed, all and sundry engaged in night of hedonistic debauchery in The Rocks to the disgust of the authorities. Quite a way start a settlement.

media_camera Sydney’s most salacious urban legend was said to have occurred not long after Arthur Phillip sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788.

10. GOSFORD GLYPHS

Okay so it’s not quite Sydney. But one of the most controversial urban legends still making the rounds is the “Hieroglyphs” found at Kariong on the Central Coast. For decades, the most popular theory was that the 300 engravings found on two sandstone walls in the 1970s were done by stranded Ancient Egyptian sailors thousands of years ago. They depict boats, animals, stick men, and two are said to be the names of kings, one of them Khufu. They have been dismissed as fakes by authorities and academics since their discovery, but amateur Egyptologists continue to try to prove the theory, despite nearby 250-year-old Aborigine petroglyphs showing considerably more erosion.

media_camera The Kariong hieroglyphs found on a sandstone wall in national park. The area surrounding the glyphs cleft has now been declared an Aboriginal Place by the NSW Government.

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