“So at a pet store in New York, they sell baby alligators and then people buy them because they’re cute when they’re little. Then they start growing and people don’t know what to do with them, so some flush them down the toilets and others leave it outside near the drain things. Now people say that there are alligators in the sewers in New York and that they’re albino because there’s no light down there. They’re like white alligators because they don’t get any sun.”

Claudia heard this a few years ago from one of her friends when they were at dinner one day. She says that they just went on a tangent and started talking about strange things and her friend knew about the alligator story. According to Claudia, this story is very popular and a lot of people know it. She thinks that this story is usually told to amongst adults when they just find out and want to share an interesting, not mundane story. They know that it is not true, but they still tell it for entertainment reasons. It probably dates back to the early 1900s when sewers were being developed and improved in New York City.

She also thinks that people tell it to children when they are little because they would believe this more than adults. This urban legend could be used to scare kids to keep them away from the sewers. I believe that this could be partially true because some children like to play around the sewer drains along sidewalks. In order to keep kids away from it because it is unsanitary and could be dangerous if someone slips, parents may tell this to their kids as a preventative measure.

This urban legend also comes up in the movie, Alligator, which was released in 1980. It was directed by Lewis Teague and written by John Sayles and is based off of the legend of alligators being flushed down toilets into city sewers. The movie adds its own flare to the story by having the alligator become a giant, man eating reptile as it drinks in an experimental growth chemical that is dumped into the sewers. This is only part of the nature of folklore for people to add their own bits to it.

I also believe that this legend came from sewer workers who might have seen something while working down there in the dark. There is always the possibility for an alligator to end up in the sewers. This legend also exists in Europe where they have intricate underground sewer systems. Since sewers are an unknown place to the majority of the population because most people have not been in the sewers, it is only natural to come up with stories about the unknown. It adds excitement to everyday life and there is nothing that people can do to prove each other wrong unless they really want to climb into sewers.

Annotation: Sayles, John. Alligator. Alligator Associates. 1980.

“You know there’s this haunted house by my home. Some woman went crazy and killed her husband and two sons and umm they never found her and she went missing and some say she still lives in the house. But the house is definitely deserted. It’s a big white Victorian, broken window on a hill in a huge dirt lot. You hear noises when you go near the house. It’s all in your mind.”

Samantha heard this story from her friends in Santa Cruz when she was in the eighth grade, so she was about thirteen years old. She says that the story is at least twenty years old because she knows thirty-eight year old people who knew about it when they were in high school. This story is usually told at night when teenagers want to scare their friends, especially after a scary movie. This legend would be very frightening to hear after watching a horror film because it is closer to home. If they have nothing else better to do and are not too scared, then they will go visit the house because it is in the neighborhood. Samantha thinks that all the sounds that people hear are in their minds. She says that bored teenagers probably came up with this legend in order to scare their friends one day.

I believe that what Samantha says has some truth to it. Since the house is a beaten down, Victorian styled home, it has that eerie feeling to it that makes the story more plausible. Being deserted, no one is quite sure of the house’s origins, so teenagers most likely just made up something to compensate for the lack of a real story. Only teenagers from Santa Cruz would know about this story unless they told it to visiting friends and relatives because it is mostly confined to the area where the house is located.

“So there’s this animal that sucks blood if you go too far into the jungle. The chupacabra. It’s a big deal in South America. My friend Mallory, was working in the Peruvian jungle when she worked there for a semester and they always warned her about it when she went out at night. I heard it was like a goat and a head of some sort of lizard or something.”

Samantha heard about this creature from her friend, Mallory, over Thanksgiving Break 2007 because her friend was just there. Mallory told Samantha about it because it was out of the ordinary and something that she only heard of when she was in South America. People in Peru are warned about the chupacabra and are told about its blood sucking ways. They tell it to everyone there because they want to prevent anything bad from happening in the jungles. Samantha thinks that the chupacabra is a very strange and interesting creature, but she does not think that it really exists.

In South America, there have been findings of dead farm animals that had the blood sucked out of them. I think that the natives who have caught a glimpse of the animal might have created an obscure description of the creature and shared it with their neighbors who then in turn, shared it with others. The natives made this animal up to explain the unexplainable. Legends are sometimes created as a result of uneasiness and anxiety. They have no idea what kind of natural animal could do this to their livestock, so they made up a new creature. I believe that it is most likely a deformed animal that resembles a reptile at night.