On last weeks episode of The Lost Ogle Show, Patrick and Marisa had Marnie Vinge, host of the Eerie Oklahoma podcast, as a guest. They discussed Sean Sellers and The Purple Church, two of the most fascinating local legends from my youth.
This got me going down a rabbit hole, remembering other myths and urban legends from my teenage years, when we'd all cram into a car and drive to some spooky place because we heard that it was haunted or mysterious.
Twin Lakes
The urban legend that I have the creepiest personal experience with is Twin Lakes in Shawnee. As the legend went, a witch was hung from a tree and the same rope still hangs there. Years later, the bodies of teenage girls were said to be discovered there inside bags that also contained the razor blades used to slit their throats.
We drove out there one dark and chilly night, following the directions we found on some urban legend website. The road became one lane, with deep ruts on either side making it impossible to turn around. We reached the dead end, turned the headlights off, and sat there for minutes, but we were all too chickenshit to get out of the car. Eventually, we decided to just go back home because we were all being weiners about everything, but had to drive in reverse for about half a mile.
The next day, my friend tried to start his car and the battery was dead, so we were maybe almost stranded out there. Of course, we believed it was some kind of witch curse because that's how these things work.
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The Oklahoma Octopus
No, we're not talking about the controversial-for-a-week mural downtown. There's an urban legend that an octopus somehow lives in one of the freshwater lakes of Oklahoma. It could be Tenkiller, Thunderbird, or Oolagah, depending on who you ask. This is creepy for two huge reasons: One, that octopi have been speculated to actually be alien lifeforms because of their genetics are so divergent to anything else on the planet, and two, that the last thing you'd want to find while noodling a honey hole for some of that sweet sweet catfish is a tentacled, Lovecraftian sea beast.
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The Haunted Bricktown Starbucks
This one is very new to me, but our own Louis Fowler went on a tour of haunted places in Bricktown and discovered that the Starbucks in Bricktown was allegedly built on top of an old graveyard and is now inhabited by a mischievous poltergeist. This must be the explanation for why your name is always misspelled on your venti pumpkin spice frappiccino.
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The Severed Head Behind The Mont
While working on this story, I asked my girlfriend what weird urban legends she heard about growing up in Norman. A story that was apparently a huge local myth was the night when an employee of beloved local establishment The Mont was taking out the trash at the end of the night, only to find a decapitated head staring at them from the dumpster.
We ended up researching this one, and apparently it's a real thing that happened, but maybe not at The Mont? There is a news story from 1996 on The Oklahoman, but it's behind their paywall, which means none of us will ever find the truth. This leads to our new game of generating local urban legends where we read the headline of a story from that dying newspaper and just extrapolate the rest of it until it becomes canon.
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The Mathis Brothers Gerbil
I don't want to say anything to propagate this one any further than it had been talked up heavily in my elementary school cafeteria, so I'll just say 'If you know, you know" and leave it at that.
