Text: “So they’re telling me that down the road, there’s a mental asylum, where a man named Jose the Ripper sneaks out every night, and as punishment for his crimes, which I don’t remember, he had his arms and legs chopped off. So he sort of scuttles around on the ground, using just his torso and then carries a knife between his teeth. And so when little children are outside at night, and they’re very quiet, they can see his glowing eyes through the bushes and the blade of the dagger being illuminated by them. And when they hear whispering and rattling wind on the windows at night, and they draw the blinds they can see the glowing eyes of Jose the Ripper as he’s about to smash through the window and murder them. 

Context:

“Okay, so I was seven years old and we were staying with some family friends in Spain. I was about seven years old and I was sitting on Julio, our family friend’s lap after having dinner. My siblings were trying to scare me about being outside in the dark at night.”

“And so then, believe it or not, that scared the shit out of me when I was seven. And so I was like crying in Leo’s lap for the rest of the night.”

Analysis:

This contemporary legend imparts a moral lesson, as the informant said, to get children to not be outside during night for their own safety. It does so by tying horror tropes to localized details, the mental asylum where this mutilated killer escaped being “down the road.” The name “Jose the Ripper” is likely a reference to the 19th century British serial killer Jack the Ripper, recast across cultures.