I don't think I've actually ever even watched any scary movies! I'm a massive coward, especially as someone who's quite into horror in novels and so on.
You stick noises and blokes in spooky suits on camera and stuff in there and it gets me good, I guess.

But you know, just recently I did some very minor legend tripping. For ANZAC day me and a couple relatives, none of whom I actually told my reasons for suggesting visiting the place, went to Narrabeen Lagoon.
It is itself a generally nice place to be, and they all wanted a good place to go, and I happened to be the one who spoke up.

It's a pretty damn thin place, let me tell you. I didn't notice anything strange while I was there other than the ridiculous amount of cyclists and super fat and cute spiders, though, admittedly, it was broad daylight and very busy. But there's been some weird stuff there.

Firstly, the Narrabeen Elephant-Man, witnessed by Mabel Walsh in April 1968:

Grey (like an elephant) in color, and with what looked like a tough, leathery skin, it had a snout resembling that of an anteater, a slim trunk, long back legs, and a pair of very short forelimbs that dangled limply as it waddled along – sideways, no less – by the edge of the road before vanishing into the scrub. Here's a link to an article on that if you want. Strangest to me about this fella is how it appeared once, disappeared, and hasn't appeared since. There is no suggestion it's any sort of extraterrestrial, as there weren't really any local UFO sightings around this time period.

Narrabeen was also the site of a whole bunch of sightings of a few UFOs in 2001 (here's a link to some of that). Various folk witnessed huge, fast, silent orange orbs whizzing about in the skies above Narrabeen. A few witnesses saw a dark shape accompanying them, flapping and moving apparently like a manta ray.

The road along Narrabeen Lagoon, Wakehurst Parkway, is actually considered one of the more haunted roads in Sydney. It's got one of those classic 'white lady' ghosts, named Kelly, who harasses drivers at night. She'll appear in the middle of the road and make drivers swerve right off into the trees, or will appear in the back of your car in your rear window and make you crash if you don't tell her to toss off. She also might appear all bloodied on the road and, when taken to a hospital by a good samaritan, will promptly vanish.
It's a pretty garbage road, I must say, all wavy and without streetlights. You'll find a lot of haunted roads also tend to be the kind of roads that you'll, uh, just generally crash a lot on.

There's a bunch of the stuff I'm aware of right now about that place. I'm not aware of any particularly dark history there--nothing, at least, distinctly dark as compared for the whole of this country in general. You'll find there's always a lot of activity happening around water, places of water, so on, which is part of the reason I personally associate Kelly with the lagoon, though she's more associated with the road itself.

Anyone else here done any good legend tripping?

1: I don't watch horror movies, but apparently both The Fugitive and The Usual Suspects count as thrillers. And I love those. Oh, oh, and Three Days of the Condor. Not really all that scary (a bit paranoid, I guess) but I love it to bits all the same.

2: Does Pokémon Black count? It's my favorite piece of internet creepypasta/urban legend for exactly one reason: There is nothing supernatural about it. In fact, there's nothing impossible about it at all. I could believe that just maybe someone hacked a copy of Pokémon Red to create a creepy version that is designed to send a message to people who play it about life and death and whatnot. In fact, it's almost kind of inspiring: someone creating a strange sort of life lesson and packaging it up as a Pokémon cartrige? Come on, there's something cool about that. Even if it probably didn't happen.

3: I don't think anything I watch here really counts as obscure, but I recommend the above nonetheless. Furthermore, I recommend a film I haven't seen: They Live. I know, one again not obscure, but the closest I could get to obscure was John Dies at the End. Which... actually, yeah. Go watch that, it's my new recommendation. It's joyously insane if it's anything like the book (I read the book, I didn't see the film. So... well, take your chances).

4: The first time I read the first Laundry Files novel. It was a dark night in Yankee Stadium when I got to the bit where they saw the Atrocity Archive proper. Which was pretty chilling on its own. And then the nailbiting climax... well, those who have read the series get the idea. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't.

Horror isn't really my go-to genre, despite being a Stephen King fanboy. The darker, more serious horror movies are a little too bleak for me; I prefer my stories with the protagonists winning in the end, even if the price is high. So I tend to like the more action/fantastical focused edge of the horror spectrum.

1. I've been told that the Tremors series doesn't count as real horror, but alas, it's Tremors. I know most of the series is more action-focused, but there's no denying that the original movie was very suspenseful. Like I said above, I like it when the human victim characters stand a fighting chance, and Tremors is all about fighting back. I just have to overlook the glaring biology fail the series employs; for the record, yes, albino animals absolutely can reproduce.

2. Does Slender Man count when it's blatantly engineered online? I say it does, because it was engineered naturally, by many minds, over time. The lack of personality or emotion make its variable backstory all the more unique, and confusing in a threatening, incomprehensible way. Marble Hornets is my definitive Slender Man story, because it does an excellent job of inserting the weird, mysterious nature and behavior of the Man into what should be the bland everyday dullness of some twenty-somethings filming low quality YouTube videos.

3. My folks, let me tell you about a campy little 1980s horror called Waxwork, which I had the luck to see aired on Sci Fi Channel way back in my teens. It's the only time I've ever been able to see it, and I am still enamored of it. The basic gist is that a creepy dude is using what appears to be a wax museum to lure folks in as sacrifices to bring about some vague apocalypse. The wax displays are all homages to horror films and genres—some classic, and some contemporary to Waxwork's release. Getting too close to each display reveals that it's actually a dimensional portal to another reality where the monsters are alive. Again, it's 80s camp, so more fun than scary, but . . . well movies are supposed to be fun. It also has a sequel that leans even farther away from horror and leans more into action, and also time travel. I seem to recall they're a bit gorey, and I can't remember the swearing level, but try to look them up some day, yeah?

4. Okay. I know now, as an adult, that the movie is considered pretty lame trash, but when I was a teenager, and I saw it with my sisters and cousins one Halloween, I got really really freaked out by the terrible film adaptation of Children of the Corn. Just the idea of a small town filled with slash-happy people being controlled by a murderous underground entity that we never actually get to see . . . I basically wasn't old enough to be watching movies like that, okay? I slept on the floor of my parents' room for a couple nights. One positive outcome, though: our cat Zoe, who always stayed in my parents' room, was super-happy to have a bonus human friend in the room with her. She sat just out of petting distance all night, facing me and non-stop purring. "Friiiiieeeeend. Friiiiieeeeeend." Not sure she actually slept through all that purring, but hey, she was a cat. She could sleep whenever she wanted!

—doctorlit, possibly not a good horror fan?