Paranoid about using the toilet in the middle of the night? Refuse to take a seat in the dark without checking first? Well, you've made the right choice. All kinds of creatures can crawl up through your sewer pipes, including rats, snakes and cockroaches.

The story of a creepy man keeping human bodies around the house is an old one, but it came true in Russia. Anatoly Moskvin was a Russian historian who would steal bodies from the local cemetery, dress them up in women's clothing and pose them around his house. At least he wasn't actually making the bodies by killing people?

'Weekend at Bernie's' is purely fictional, right? Nobody could be that stupid, you naively think to yourself. Never underestimate human stupidity. Two men in Denver found their buddy dead in his apartment. They claim they thought he was alive and took him out on the town. On his tab, of course. Their friend was charged for the drinks and they were charged with criminal impersonation, identity theft and abusing a corpse.

Slender Man is a recent urban legend of a faceless man stalking the innocent at night in the woods. Well, a real life version existed in Western Pennsylvania. Charlie No-Face or the Green Man, Raymond Robinson was left faceless and missing an arm after being injured by an electrical line as a child. Afraid of causing a scene, he only went out in the dead of night for walks, and became something of an urban legend.

A Pishtaco is a South American version of a vampire that sucks fat instead of blood. This urban legend came to life when a gang of men were arrested in Peru, and Coca Cola bottles filled with human fat were found, along with other human remains. They had been rendering the fat out of their victims, and selling it on the black market.

Creepy, ax-wielding men dressed in weird animal suits, stalking people in the night has to be entirely fictional, right? If only. A man dressed in a full bunny costume wielding an ax terrorized a couple folks back in 1970 for trespassing. In one instance, he just stood still on the porch of an empty house, and when confronted, began chopping away at the woodwork, screaming about trespassing.

The image of an angry chef using his culinary skills to attack somebody is an old idea, but cook David Viens gave new meaning to the term 'Kitchen Nightmares' when he killed his wife, took her body to work, put her in the slow cooker and turned it on. There, she cooked for four days before he said, "I let her cool, I strained it out." There's no word on whether he tried his grisly meal.

Many folks are wary of police for a number of reasons, but the idea of a man disguising himself as a cop to gain his victims trust is not a new one. Unfortunately, it's based on truth. Numerous killers, including the infamous Ted Bundy used this technique. Thankfully, Bundy's intended victim managed to escape.

"Tie your shoe or the escalator will get you," parents tell their frightened children at malls. Well, it turns out there's truth to this old wives' tale. Many folks of all ages have faced horrific disfigurement after the murderous teeth of escalators got a hold of their loose articles of clothing. One man was even strangled to death after his hood was inexplicably caught in the machine's mechanism.

Being buried alive or prematurely presumed dead is a common fear for many folks, and it's another one that has some basis in truth. One octogenarian was thought to be dead, zipped in a body bag and sent to the morgue. After her body was found on the floor, covered in self-inflicted wounds, it was discovered that she wasn't dead before. Sadly, the freezer finished the job.

Conversely, we have the story of Jean Hilliard, a woman who was found literally frozen solid in the snow. She was brought into the hospital where she was thawed out, and miraculously came back to life just fine. The doctors who worked on her had no idea how she managed to survive without at least frostbite or brain damage.

Receiving phone calls from the dead is one of those old horror movie tropes that can still send shivers down the spine. After a horrific and fatal commuter train accident in California in 2008, relatives of Charles Peck began receiving phone calls from the man they knew to have been on the train. His phone inexplicably sent out 35 calls, and was used to find his body in the wreckage.

One could call horror films modern urban legends, and the idea of the torture porn film series 'Saw' coming to life is as terrifying as it can get. And it did. Brian Wells, a pizza delivery guy, was forced to rob a bank for fear of the explosive collar strapped around his neck. He was apprehended by police who didn't believe his story about the collar, and it detonated, killing him. It was later discovered he was in on the plan, but thought the bomb would be fake. That's a picture of the actual collar, by the way.

You have to be truly desperate to go swimming in a pool so cloudy you can't see the bottom, especially with all the urban legends of bodies and other creepy things hiding down there. There's some truth to these stories as the body of a missing woman was discovered floating in a pool. After three days of decomposing below the surface, unnoticed in the (open for business!) public pool, she finally floated to the surface, traumatizing the trespassing teenagers who found her in the middle of the night.

Staying away from windows and not using the phone during thunderstorms is just an old, paranoid wives' tale, right? Wrong. People have actually died by electrocution when their house was hit by lightning, and the current traveled through the wires and into their ear.

Out of the long list of drug side effects your health teacher rattled off to keep you away from using, "PCP makes you eat people" always sounded like an urban legend. Unfortunately, the unpredictable dissociative anesthetic has inspired cannibalism. Rapper Big Lurch ripped out the lungs of his roommate and took giant bites out of her flesh. He was found later wandering the streets in a daze, covered in blood and with human remains sitting in his stomach. Just say no!