Urban Legends In American Culture

Urban legends can be found all throughout our society. One of the reasons why they are so predominant in our society is because they are focused on topics that play key roles in our lives. There are urban legends that are filled with horror, anxiety, sadness, but most of all they prove to teach valuable lessons. These lessons are known to come across so clearly, simply due to the way in which they are shown. Legends are always supposed to be told in a convincing means no matter how suspicious their actual story seems to be. One of the most common as well as interesting types of legends is about vampires. Vampires have changed through the time from the myth, the legendary feared creatures, to those that are easily seen in the world nowadays

The story goes on, how the white European settlers and religious missionaries were going to Africa to help with the AIDS epidemic. These white people were Pentecostal and spoke in strange tongues. The white people were on religious missions and often taking the Africans blood and spreading even more viral epidemics in Africa. The people of Malawi believed that these foreigners were actually harvesting their blood and were not able to survive in Africa without the blood of the people. In the article “When the Vampires Come for You: A True Story of Ordinary Horror” Adam Ashforth examines historical documents stating “Rumors of bloodsucking that periodically swept through east and south- central Africa, from the teens through the 1950s of the last century. In these stories, blood was said to be collected—by firemen, curiously, and prostitutes, among others—for sale to whites. Whites, as White reports, were said by the locals to be unable to survive in the tropics without consuming African blood to replenish their strength” (Ashforth 853). The author goes on to tell a story of a young woman that was speaking to an elderly man from the town recounting a warning about vampires or blood-suckers “Earlier in the day, warning her that “there are some strangers who have come to suck blood from people.” He told her the story of a schoolboy who had fallen victim to the bloodsuckers, and that everyone was being warned to stay awake until 10:00 pm at night to be on guard. Young men armed with sticks, stones, and pangas (machetes) were enforcing a curfew between the hours of 7:00 pm and 4:00 am” (Ashforth