It's that time of year again, kids! What time is that, you ask? Why, it's pants-shittin' time! Time to revisit our Halloween tradition of sharing the horrifying urban legends that we tend to think of as mere cautionary tales, designed to sway us from wandering down dark alleys or microwaving the baby, but that have actually happened to very unfortunate (and, likely, now very deceased) people.

5 The Corpse-Caked Train

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The Legend:

When your job is to keep 150 tons of steel from transforming into 150 tons of mangulated death (all while barreling along a thin piece of track at hundreds of miles per hour), that's bound to inspire some horror stories. Case in point: a high-speed train engineer feels a slight bump as he's zooming down the tracks, but a quick check out the front window doesn't reveal anything out of the ordinary. What is out of the ordinary is the piercing wail of every single person the conductor tosses a friendly wave to as the train passes them by, so he stops and, accompanied by the earsplitting screech of violins, discovers something a whole lot bigger (not to mention a whole lot more pants-filling) than a grasshopper plastered to the front of the train.

Patrick Janicek

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"Dammit. Get the squeegee."

It's a person, in case that wasn't clear or something.

The Truth:

As a high-speed HGV train pulled into a railway station in France, awaiting passengers were greeted with a scene straight out of their Thomas-the-Tank-Engine-inspired nightmares: literally embedded into the front of the train was a somewhat fresh, more-than-somewhat flattened corpse.

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Initial attempts to pass him off as a hood ornament were unsuccessful.

Nobody's quite sure of the hows or whys, but a cyclist rode his way straight into a Stephen King story near the small village of Petit-Croix. This meeting of man and locomotive went pretty much exactly how anyone who grew up watching too many Road Runner cartoons and then binged on Evil Dead as a teenager might imagine it: the cyclist was splattered against the front of the train like some kind of gore-filled Wile E. Coyote, and then he clung there all the way to the train's next stop -- 25 miles away -- before anyone even noticed.

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How did the engineer not see a mass of pulverized human stuck to the front of his train like a ghastly, oversized Wacky Wally? Well, for one, trains have pretty huge blind spots, and for two, engineers be busy, yo. "We are looking at the speed controls and at the electrical equipment, we cannot see a pedestrian by the side of the tracks," said the train's driver. "If someone throws himself under the train we are completely helpless. This is a train, not a wheelbarrow. It cannot stop in 100 meters."