Terrifying True Urban Legends: A Toilet Stalker, a Demon Camel, and a Cursed Mansion
Today, we're covering three terrifying true urban legends: a South African schoolyard legend called Pinky Pinky with an unnerving connection to a real case in Japan, the history of Summerwind Mansion, which reveals more about its owners than the house itself…and the true origins behind the Red Ghost.
TW: Stalking, mention of child abuse threats
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SOURCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkt-mOe1RKQ&t=5s
https://hyper-a-in-the-world-of-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/Pinky_Pinky
https://en.namu.wiki/w/%ED%9B%84%EC%BF%A0%EC%8B%9C%EB%A7%88%20%EC%A0%95%ED%99%94%EC%A1%B0%20%EC%82%AC%EA%B1%B4https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/mysterious-death-in-female-toilet-fukushima-japan.4414927/
https://min.news/en/world/647c44d5af986bcbf5dad0b333dfc1f0.html
https://fukushima.travel/blogs/following-fukushimas-footpath-miyakoji-area-in-tamura-city/133
https://ccdrcollections.omeka.net/items/show/783
https://www.americanheritage.com/red-ghost
https://tombstoneterrors.com/the-legend-of-the-red-ghost/
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101164/
https://www.americanheritage.com/red-ghost
https://armyhistory.org/the-u-s-armys-camel-corps-experiment/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/haunted-travel-wisconsins_b_5021201
https://books.google.com/books?id=jRBPbFHCoV4C&pg=PA59&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://paranormalmilwaukee.com/news/a-second-look-summerwind-mansion/
https://thought.is/the-story-of-the-summerwind-mansion-will-scare-the-shit-out-of-you/
https://ghostshipfragrance.com/blogs/a-bottle-of-ghosts/summerwind-americas-most-haunted-house
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOwHdfnuQss
TRANSCRIPT
Young girls in the US grow up with all kinds of spooky rituals. Light As A Feather. Oujie Boards. If you’re like me you were always trying to get bloody mary started at the sleepover. But in the ‘90s, young girls in South Africa had their own, unique ritual:
Pinky Pinky.
According to an old urban legend, you’ll want to go into one of the school bathrooms when you know you wont be interrupted. Then, you’ll look into the mirror and say his name three times, Pinky Pinky Pinky
At first, nothing will happen, you’ll want to leave, thinking that the ritual didn’t work. But then, you’ll see him standing behind you
Red eyes, with greasy, dangling hair falling around his pale, bloated face. It looks like he’s been living in the plumbing, waiting for this moment. Then, you’ll hear his voice, crying that he’s all alone. Begging you to come join him. You wont be able to resist. You’ll walk into the stall behind you to join him, and his voice will stop crying, and start laughing.
Then, Pinky will grab you by your throat, and unhinge its jaw. He’ll open his mouth impossibly wide, revealing rows of massive, jagged teeth. You wont even realize it as he starts eating your insides, it happens so fast.
And by the time the next girl comes into the bathroom, there will be no trace you were ever there, and Pinky Pinky will wait for the next little girl to summon him.
Now Pinky Pinky has been shared on school yards for decades. Girls in South Africa grew up TERRIFIED of him. But we can actually trace some of this legend. It’s believed to have started in the ‘90s by teachers at girls’ schools in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was a cautionary tale or urban legend meant to instill fear in young girls about going to the bathroom alone. Pinky Pinky was supposedly a coward, and would stay away if all the girls went to the bathroom together.
And there’s a few different reasons for this. Some teachers feared that actual predators were laying in wait inside of the bathrooms, one study claims that 40% of women in South Africa are affected by sexual violence, so it makes sense that teachers were trying to protect their students.
one Yale study actually suggests a lot of that violence happens due to a lack of sanitary toilets, which leads to women being vulnerable when they have to walk long distances to find a functioning public restroom. Regardless, it was a way to keep young girls aware of their surroundings.
According to different tellings of the legend, Pinky Pinky might take you to its lair beneath the toilets where it would keep you prisoner with other little girls until it was ready to eat you. Or it might just claw out your guts or bite off your head right there in the stall.
And in some tellings teachers would even tell young girls to not wear pink because pinky prefers the color.
Now the young girls that were told the legend of Pinky Pinky grew up to understand that he was just that…a legend. There wasn’t a horrifying monster that waited in the stalls for them to come in alone. No, the real monsters were people.
See, there were a few major news stories being reported on at the time that the Pinky Pinky legend was being created, and that might have influenced the way this legend was crafted and shared.
And one of those stories, probably the most bizarre If I’m being honest, didn’t actually happen in south africa, but somewhere totally unexpected…
It was the night of February 28th, 1989, in the small mountain village of Miyakoji in central Japan. The sky was dark and snow was falling. The air was freezing. 23-year-old Yumi Tanaka, an elementary school teacher, was trying to get warm in her small apartment after coming home from work.
Then the phone rang. Her heart sank and a pit formed in her stomach. She knew she shouldn’t, but she answered the phone anyways
The voice on the other end was strange and muffled. It was a man’s voice, high-pitched and irritated. The man went on to say horrible things about Yumi’s body and how he wanted to do equally horrible things to her. Her heart started racing and she quickly hung up.
This wasn’t the first time this had happened. She had been getting these calls for weeks, and nothing she ever said on the phone made them stop. Her friends could see how much this was affecting her, too. She was always stressed out, she was losing the light in her eyes.
So one day, One of her friends, a young man named Naoyuki Kanno, came to her. He was willing to do anything to help, so he offered to use his contacts in the local government to try and trace the calls. This was so nice of him, he definitely didn’t need to do that, but Yumi really appreciated it. Unfortunately, nothing had come of it, but it was nice knowing that Naoyuki really cared for her.
Later that night, Yumi made sure the door was locked and tried to relax. She walked across the living room to the bathroom. She flipped on the light. The simple, dank room wasn’t very inviting. Her toilet wasn’t some nice, high-tech toilet like the ones in Tokyo. It was a squat-toilet, basically a hole in the ground that led to a septic tank outside. She was about to use the toilet when she noticed something unusual in the hole.
There, at the bottom of the toilet, was a shoe. A man’s shoe.
She jumped in surprise. How could that have gotten there? Had someone been in her apartment? She looked around, almost expecting to see someone in the corner. But there was nobody there.
The only other thing that made sense to her was that maybe someone had thrown the shoe in through the lid of the septic tank outside. But to do that they would have had to open the lid, which could cause more issues. so, She had to go outside and see.
She put on her scarf and coat and unlocked her door. It was freezing outside, and she trudged through the snow and around the back of her apartment. She found the large pipe of the septic tank sticking out of the ground. And For the second time tonight, a pit formed in her stomach.
The lid on the top of the pipe was askew. Someone had tampered with it.
She almost just ran forward and closed the lid, but something inside of her told her to look down inside of the tank. and It was far worse than she could have imagined.
The pipe went down a few feet and then off to the side where it opened back up under her toilet, forming a U shape. And there was a foot sticking out at the bottom of the pipe. Someone was in her septic tank.
Yuki called the police, who arrived on the scene a short while later. They tried reaching down into the pipe to pull on the foot, but it was a narrow fit for most of the officers. They then tried tying ropes to the foot and pulling, but that didn’t work either. Whoever was down there was STUCK
There was no movement and no response when they called out so they were pretty sure that whoever was down there was dead.
After a short time, they managed to get digging equipment on the scene. The police had to tear up Yumi’s backyard as they removed the entire U-shaped pipe that made up the septic tank that led from her toilet to the outside.
It was nasty work, and likely mortifying for Yumi to have her toilet literally dug up out of the ground by a whole squad of police officers.
Once they had the pipe out on the lawn, they used tools to crack it open. The pieces fell away, and Yumi screamed.
Inside the pipe, covered in sewage, was a man. Laying flat on his back, with his feet underneath one of the entrances to the pipe, and his head, facing upwards, underneath the other pipe entrance to Yumis toilet. And just like the police guessed, he was dead
the dead man was only wearing pants. One shoe was left above ground, and the other was with him in the pipe. He also had his shirt folded and clutched tightly to his chest, as if he was worried about it getting dirty.
The body was transported to the local morgue. It was so covered in filth that it was impossible to tell who it was.The coroner slowly and methodically cleaned away the grime, revealing more and more about the deceased.
Wiping down the torso, he didn’t see any obvious wounds. He moved on to the legs. Nothing there either. He then wiped down the arms. These were also free of any obvious signs of trauma. It didn’t seem like this man had been murdered. A chill went down the coroner’s spine.
the man hadn’t been stuffed into the pipe. He would have had some trauma to his body if that was the case. No, He had put himself there.
He quickly moved to the face. He wiped it down, then dropped the cloth and gasped. He recognized this man. Everyone in town would.
It was Naoyuki Kanno, Yumi’s friend. The man who had supposedly been helping her trace the harassing phone calls. But now it didn’t look like he wasn’t trying to help at all. It looked like he was trying to peep on her by crawling into her toilet.
A few days earlier, on February 24th, 1989, Naoyuki, 26 years old at the time, left his family home, telling his family he’d be back later that day. But he never returned. His family reported him missing, but a major national event delayed the investigation.
Emperor Hirohito passed away that same day. He was the most important leader in Japanese history, and almost everyone took the 24th through the 27th off to mourn him and either attend his funeral or watch it on TV. So no one really thought to look for Naoyuki
As far as the coroner could tell, Naoyuki likely died on the 26th, and had been in the septic tank until Yumi found him after returning to work on the 28th.
But police were completely stumped as to how he found himself there. It was almost physically impossible. It was only 36 centimeters across, and the average Japanese male had a torso width of 40 centimeters. But Naoyuki had clearly driven himself there - his car was found nearby with the keys still inside. Once at the tank, he would have had to wiggle his way in.
And then he would have had to navigate the sharp 90 degree turn where the pipe turned toward the apartment. According to the coroner, he got stuck and froze to death. It was ruled death by misadventure.
Naoyuki was a well-respected member of the community, known for organizing youth sports and giving political speeches. He had a good job at the local nuclear power plant. And as I mentioned, he was friends with Yumi. Why would he do this to her?
His father refused to believe the police explanation. He started a petition to re-open the case as a murder, and got 4,300 signatures from local townspeople who also couldn’t believe Naoyuki would do such a thing.
But the police had no other evidence, and again, there were no signs of trauma on Naoyuki’s body. They had no reason to re-open it.
The unusual nature of the case led to it spreading throughout Japan, with many people forming their own conspiracy theories to explain how a nice young man could end up inside a woman’s toilet. Personally, I think he was a weirdo I don;t think there was much more to it
In fact, this whole story feels like an urban legend. However, we did find a pretty detailed Namuwiki article, which is a Korean pop culture wiki. It has links to first hand sources and goes into a ton of detail on the case. Some of it is hard to parse as the English translation is very rough. But it does seem that this actually happened.
The Namuwiki article also brings up a meme that roughly translates to “The Four Great Perverts of Japan.” These are similar cases describing incidents from the 2000s where Japanese men did unfathomably stupid and gross things just to creep on women.
One man broke into a girl’s school swimming pool to try on the girls’ swimsuits.
Another man broke into a bunch of different girls’ schools to steal and smell the girls’ shoes.
And another man collected saliva samples from over 500 different girls over the course of years.
But the most recent of these was a 28-year-old man who was arrested in 2015 for hiding in storm drains to take pictures up women’s skirts. He was absolutely out of his mind, saying he wanted to “be reborn in a second life as a road.” He was otherwise a successful office worker living in a nice apartment.
This man has strong parallels to Naoyuki in that Naoyuki was also successful, and so no one could have expected that he would do something so perverse, and so stupid. It goes to show that some men can be harboring significant issues that they hide from the world.
Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence against Naoyuki is what happened after he died. Remember the harassing phone calls Yumi was receiving? The ones Naoyuki was supposed to help trace? After his death, the calls stopped. Yumi was never bothered again.
I think it’s interesting how these stories can travel around the world and change from culture to culture. Humans have a way of combining fact and fiction to create even darker legends that take on a life of their own.
That’s never been more true than in our next urban legend, a place in Wisconsin called Summerwind Mansion…it’s a haunted house where it’s rumored anyone who lives there goes mad.
Summerwind Mansion sits on West Bay Lake in northern Wisconsin, right on the border with the Michigan upper peninsula. It’s an old place where early British explorers first came into contact with members of the Dakota tribe. Dark-green trees loom over the black water.
The house itself sticks out from the trees like a giant human skull. Its many-gabled roof and upper story windows give the impression of empty eye sockets looking out over the lake. Add in the chipped, grey-wood siding, and Summerwind is more than a little reminiscent of Amityville.
The local children would tell stories of previous owners. Legend says The house drove anyone who tried to own it mad. One after another, they broke down and fled, or had to be committed.
And according to the legend, if you were to step foot inside , you too might feel your mind start to warp.
Now, maybe this was just a way for the neighborhood kids to dare each other to go in. They’d tell each other these stories while sitting in the abandoned house’s basement, surrounded by decaying furniture and the drug and alcohol paraphernalia from previous groups of partying teens.
But most of them were ignorant of the house’s real history. These legends might have been a lot more accurate than they ever could have guessed . The previous owners were strange, but in ways these kids couldn’t have imagined.
Before it was known as Summerwind, the house was just a fishing lodge. It was purchased in 1916 by a wealthy businessman named Robert Lamont, who would go on to be the Secretary of Commerce to President Herbert Hoover from 1929-1932. He spent $125,000 on renovations, which would be nearly $4 million today.
As the house was transformed from a lodge to a mansion, the contractors immediately began to notice that there was something odd about it. Something that was making it really hard for them to complete their work. They'd measure out part of one room, but when they came back to re-measure, it would be a different length. It was like the house was changing dimensions on them. But the mansion was finished in 1918, allowing Robert and his family to move in. They called it “Lilac Hills.”
Locals just called it “The Lamont Mansion.”
One night in the early 1930s, Robert and his wife were having dinner in the dining room. Their servants had been sent away for the night. As they ate their food, lit by the dim electric lamps of the time, they heard a loud banging from the kitchen Robert and his wife looked at each other in shock. He ran to another room where he retrieved a pistol, fearing they had an intruder on their hands.
He walked into the kitchen, gun raised. Everything was still and quiet, before another loud bang made Robert jump. He pointed his gun at the basement door, which was glowing in the dim light of the kitchen bulbs. The door shook. Something was clearly behind it, waiting to get out.
But Robert could think of no natural reason why someone should be down there. The servants were gone. His children were grown and living on their own. He kept the gun raised, just in time for the lock to give and the door to come crashing open. The room filled with bright, blue light as a strange, translucent being floated into the kitchen from the basement. Robert couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman. He didn’t care. He fired two shots.
The figure disappeared in an instant, and the blue glow went with it, returning the kitchen to normal. Robert stared ahead, trying to process what he saw. The figure was gone, but there, embedded in the basement door, were his two bullets. Had he just shot at a ghost?
The Lamonts didn’t stick around much longer, moving out of the house and leaving it vacant until Robert’s death in 1948. The house was then purchased by a man we now know only as “Mr. Keefer,” and his wife, Lillian.
But reports say the house was even more unkind to them.
Mr. Keefer died of a heart attack only a few months into staying there. No one knows why, but Lillian became so frightened that she left the house in a hurry, saying that her neighbors could have all of her things. Her parting words were that she wasn’t responsible if anything happened to anyone while they were in the house.
Next, Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw moved in with their six children and pet raccoon in the early 1970s. Yes, they had a pet racoon. They hoped they could renovate the old place and make a life there. But they should have done more research. The house would torture them more than either of the previous couples.
They both began to… change. Ginger became obsessed with the color of the walls, and she would constantly paint and repaint them. And Arnold would stay up all hours playing strange music on an organ. He claimed spirits were telling him what to play.
When they tried to get people to come help them in repairing the house, most refused. They were desperate, as essential things like the water pump and heater were breaking down. When they finally did get a repairman to come, both things had mysteriously repaired themselves.
Arnold was at the end of his rope. He felt like something was wrong with the house, there was an unusual force about it. He wanted to figure out where it was coming from, so he searched up and down until he got to the closet in the guest bedroom. Inside, there was an old chest of drawers, which he moved to the side. And there, hidden, was a small entrance to a crawlspace.
He swung the little door open and peered inside, but it was so dark he couldn’t see how big the space was. Then, he had an idea. He called one of his children and told them to go look around inside.
The child was inside for only a minute before they started screaming and ran out. Arnold grabbed them and asked what they saw, and they said they found a skeleton with dark hair clinging to its skull. He then sent in the other kids just to be sure, and they all claimed to see the same thing.
That night, the family all huddled together in the living room, too afraid to be alone. Suddenly, a blue light flooded in from the direction of the dining room. They looked in to see an ethereal woman dancing in the air above the table.
The sight seems to have finally sent Arnold over the edge. The next morning, when Ginger found him, he was chasing after the family's pet raccoon with a large butcher knife. Ginger said she had no choice but to have him committed. It was him or the raccoon and I guess she made up her mind.
After that, She divorced Arnold, and moved herself and her children in with her parents. And she put the Lamont Mansion behind her.
But that was hardly the end of the story of the Lamont Mansion
Ginger’s father, Raymond Bober, was fascinated by what had happened to her and moved onto the property, staying in a trailer. He apparently hoped to witness some of the same supernatural things his daughter had seen.
And, according to him, he didn’t have to wait long. He claims to have been visited in a dream by the ghost of Jonathan Carver, a British explorer who was one of the first Europeans to scout the area. He told Raymond the house was actually called Summerwind, and that a deed to much of the land of northern Wisconsin was buried there.
Raymond didn’t find the deed, but he promptly wrote a book about the house called “The Carver Effect,” and started making money off of its sales.
And here’s the context that even a lot of modern locals have forgotten - most of the legends we’ve discussed up until this point come from that book. Before this, the house wasn’t called Summerwind, and there weren’t any written stories of hauntings.
The explorer whose ghost Raymond claimed to see, Jonathan Carver, was a bit of a shady character from the early 1800s who abandoned his family in Wisconsin to start a new one in London. He died there 125 years before the mansion was even built.
His descendants, left high and dry, created a story about how the Dakota tribe had supposedly left their family a huge part of northern Wisconsin. They said they had the paperwork to prove it. They called the document, “The Carver Deed,” and said whoever held it would supposedly own all of that land. Judges recognized it as a con then, and The Carver Deed became its own kind of urban legend. Some suggest Raymond Bober was just dredging it back up years later for his book.
In order to better sell the legend, he colored it with new, likely made-up details about some of the then more recent inhabitants of the land.
Raymond published his book in 1979, two years after the Amityville Horror book was published and became a huge sensation. Perhaps he was just chasing his own version of that story.
And so that would seem to be a conclusive source for this urban legend. The various owners mostly seemed to be dealing with mental health issues.
However, there is one strange thing that is hard to explain.
The house sat empty for years after the Hinshaws lived there, becoming the popular hangout for neighborhood kids that I mentioned.
It was mostly intact, until one day in 1988, when dark stormclouds appeared over the lake. A heavy thunderstorm pelted the area with wind, rain, and lightning. And out of those dark clouds, a lightning bolt struck Summerwind, lighting it on fire. The flames grew and grew until they engulfed the whole house. By morning, all that was left was the basement and two chimneys. Firefighters thought this was strange, given that the house’s lightning rods were still intact at the time of the fire.
Since then, any investor that has tried to do something with the property has been scared away by local legends, or met with misfortune.
Even if Summerwind isn’t haunted, it sure seems like it wants to be left alone.
Time is a funny thing. Communities can forget their own history, and come to prefer the legends that they tell one another. Just like Pinky Pinky is in some ways a more palatable monster than the real horror of sexual assault in South Africa, Summerwind is a more interesting legend than con artistry at the Lamont Mansion.
But sometimes, the reverse can be true. Sometimes, history is actually stranger than fiction, and we come to believe the legend just because we can’t fathom that reality is just as weird. Our final Urban Legend is from the American West, and it’s a tall tale in more ways than one.
The story of the Red Ghost begins in the dry, desert hills of Eagle Creek, Arizona, in 1883. One night A family of American sheep farmers was eating dinner when they heard the horrible sounds coming from the pasture where they kept their sheep.
It was too dark to see outside, but they knew that this must be an attack from the nearby Apache tribe. There was nothing the family could do though, they thought they’d be killed immediately if they went outside to stop the attack, so instead they sat around their table and listened to the massacre of their sheep.
At first light, the two oldest brothers peeked their heads outside to find that the Apaches were gone. They went up into the hills surrounding the ranch house with their father to try and find what was left of their livestock.
Their mother didn’t love the idea of being left behind alone with the children, but she had no choice. She planned to stay inside as much as they could and wait for the men to return.
But she soon realized they needed fresh water from the outdoor pump. And that meant walking around as an open target.
As she walked across the field she could see the horse hoof prints in the grass. All of their carefully stacked firewood, their tools, their fence, it was all destroyed and laying in bits and pieces around the yard., she could also see long streaks of blood where her sheep had been carried away. And some of the streaks looked like they had red hair in them…
The woman tried not to think about it, as she made her way to the pump. But as she got closer, the sudden snort of a large animal caused her to stop in her tracks. She looked up to see something horrible towering over her.
Back in the house, one of the children heard a scream. <<>> She ran to the window and looked outside, Expecting to see more apache warriors, but instead, she saw something she couldn’t believe
Across the yard, near the water pump, was a giant, red buffalo. Seated atop its back was what looked like a dark eyed, sharp-toothed demon, surely straight out of hell.
The men soon returned and the young girl told them what she saw. They quickly went over to investigate the water pump.
There, at the foot of the pump, was the broken body of their mother. Every bone seemed to be broken. Not just broken, flattened. Thousands of bits of bone stuck out from her skin and blood-soaked dress. Her hair was tangled and matted with blood. It was as if something massive had landed right on her.
Strangely, the area around the body was covered in bits of red hair.
An official inquiry was opened into the death, with law enforcement believing the family might have killed the woman. But a jury found no reason to bring charges when the cause of death was so strange and there was no real motive. They ruled it “death in a manner unknown.”
But soon, whispers of this creature the family saw started spreading. They called it The Red Ghost
A local newspaper known as the Mohave County Miner became obsessed with reporting on any further sightings of the creature. Over the next several years, they shared accounts from other locals who had run-ins with the creature. And there were a LOT
Two local miners were camped next to a river where they were searching for gold. They were sound asleep in their tent when some sort of animal hoof came crashing down between them. It continued to trample the tent, with hooves stamping all around them over and over. They were lucky not to be trampled themselves.
When they climbed out of the tent, they saw a massive, red creature thundering into the dark desert.
The Mohave County Miner next reported that a group of miners caught sight of the Red Ghost and cornered it, firing at it with their rifles. It escaped up a hill, but not before one of the miners landed a shot on it. The bullet didn’t hit flesh - it hit something on the creature’s back and knocked it off. When they investigated, they found something white and round in the dirt - it was a human skull.
It wasn’t until February 1893, ten years after the first Red Ghost sighting, that the legend finally came to an end.
An Eagle Creek farmer named Mizoo Hastings woke up one morning to find something large and red in the back of his garden. It was the Red Ghost.
He grabbed his gun and fired, and this time, his shot hit the creature right in the eye. It fell down, dead.
When he got close, what he saw was more confusing than scary. The Red Ghost wasn’t a buffalo, but a red camel, like the ones found in Africa. And it had old leather straps on its torso, as if some sort of saddle had been on it for years.
I mean, it sounds like a legend, that an African camel had been terrorizing a small community in Arizona.
But, the wild part in all of this is there actually were camels in Arizona 30 years prior.
In 1857, adventurer Edward Beale led an expedition from Forth Smith, Arkansas, to Los Angeles. This was one of the first American surveys of the Southwest. But he didn’t use horses - he used camels, imported by the US Army for this purpose. They thought that camels would be better travel companions because they could go three days without water and made really good time across the desert.
But the reality was much less ideal. Camels are kind of jerks. If one of the explorers tried to put one more pound of cargo on a camel than the camel was comfortable with, the camel would spit directly in their eye.
If they tried to lasso a camel, the camel would charge and trample him.
That’s all to say - camels are partners, not servants, and they demand to be treated like it.
The camels were used by both the Union and Confederates during the Civil War, but were sold after and spread out across the desert in a variety of jobs. Some were involved in skirmishes with Native American tribes.
In the case of the Red Devil It’s possible that an unlucky soldier took an arrow or bullet to the head, but stayed tied up in his saddle. As his camel wandered, it’s possible his body stayed in the saddle and decomposed, until his skeleton became confused with a devil, and the legend was born
Urban legends are deeply psychological - we can use them to avoid facing our real fears head on, or to build up something in our head that actually isn’t that scary in real life. It’s avoidance or catastrophizing that snowball over the years until many people accept the legends as fact.
And sometimes, they’re just born of ignorance. Those poor Arizona settlers truly had no context for why a giant Mediterranean camel with a dead man on its back would be attacking them.
It’s fun to be able to bring some of that context to you now. These stories are absolutely still disturbing and spooky on their own, with or without supernatural elements. But maybe in hearing them you’ll be a little less afraid when encountering the scary, strange, or simply unexplainable things in your own life.