It's a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood They told you the suburbs were a great place to live. They said nothing bad could ever happen here. But they were wrong. This collection of terrifying true stories exposes the dark side of life in the ’burbs—from corpses buried in backyards and ghosts lurking in fast food restaurants to UFOs, vanishing persons, bizarre apparitions, and worse. Consider: • The Soccer Mom’s Secret. Meet Melinda Raisch of Columbus, Ohio. She’s the wife of a dentist. A mother of three. A PTA member. And she has enough murderous secrets to fill a minivan. • Noise Pollution. More than 100 residents of Kokomo, Indiana, claim their small town is under attack by a low-pitched humming sound that erodes health and sanity. Too bad they’re the only ones who can hear it. • Death Takes a Holiday inn. There’s nothing more reassuring than a big chain hotel in a quaint small town—unless it’s the Holiday Inn of Grand Island, New York, where you’ll spend the night with the spirit of a mischievous little girl. So lock your doors, dim the lights, and prepare to stay up all night with this creepy collection of true tales. We promise you’ll never look at white picket fences the same way again!

This revised edition of the original reference standard for urban legends provides an updated anthology of common myths and stories, and presents expanded coverage of international legends and tales shared and popularized online. From roasted babies to vanishing hitchhikers to housewives in football helmets, this exhaustive and highly readable encyclopedia provides descriptions of hundreds of individual legends and their variations, examines legend themes, and explains scholarly approaches to the genre. Revised and expanded to include updated versions of the entries from the award-winning first edition, this work provides additional entries on a wide range of new topics that include terrorism, recent political events, and Hurricane Katrina. Entries in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Updated and Expanded Edition discuss the presence of urban legends in comic books, literature, film, music, and many other areas of popular culture, as well as the existence of "too good to be true" stories in Argentina, China, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and several other countries. Serving as both an anthology of stories as well as a reference work, this encyclopedia will serve as a valuable resource for students and a source book for journalists, professional folklorists, and others who are researching or interested in urban legends.

The interdisciplinary essays in Decolonial Voices discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. This collection represents several key directions in the field: First, it charts how subaltern cultural productions of the US/ Mexico borderlands speak to the intersections of "local," "hemispheric," and "globalized" power relations of the border imaginary. Second, it recovers the Mexican women's and Chicana literary and cultural heritages that have been ignored by Euro-American canons and patriarchal exclusionary practices. It also expands the field in postnationalist directions by creating an interethnic, comparative, and transnational dialogue between Chicana and Chicano, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies. Contributors include Norma AlarcÃ3n, Arturo J. Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Alejandra Elenes, RamÃ3n Garcia, MarÃa Herrera-Sobek, Patricia Penn Hilden, Gaye T. M. Johnson, Alberto Ledesma, Pancho McFarland, Amelia MarÃa de la Luz Montes, Laura Elisa Pérez, Naomi Quiñonez, Sarah Ramirez, Rolando J. Romero, Delberto Dario Ruiz, Vicki Ruiz, José David SaldÃvar, Anna Sandoval, and Jonathan Xavier Inda.

Land of carpools and cul-de-sacs! Home to good schools and green lawns! An idyllic place where nothing bad ever happens--right? Right?Wrong. As David Lynch and Desperate Housewives have taught us, life in the 'burbs has a dark side--and Surburban Legends shows the worst of it. Here are 75 spooky tales of corpses buried in back yards, ghosts in department stores, UFO sightings, vanishing persons, and much more!

"From her humble beginnings as a teenage country singer to her record-breaking Eras Tour, Taylor Swift's career is incomparable both in her mastery over multiple genres and the pure scale of her fan base and success. By weaving effortlessly through country, rock, pop, indie, and folk music, Swift has created a style of her own. [This book provides] a comprehensive review of her entire songbook to date, covering all eleven studio albums and more than 200 songs that tell a dramatic story of life, love, and triumph"--

Urban Legends of Theology surveys 40 of the most common misunderstandings of Christian doctrine. Some of the urban legends are cultural truisms that turn out not to be true; others are misconceptions of what the Bible and Christian tradition actually teach. Author and theologian Michael Wittmer writes in an engaging and incisive manner, probing beliefs nearly every churchgoer has heard at one time or another, such as: The Bible is our only authority All sin is the same before God God won’t give you more than you can handle Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship We are the hands and feet of Jesus Urban Legends of Theology corrects these misconceptions and offers a better alternative in each one’s place, guiding readers into the full riches and freedom of Christian theology rightly understood.

Eugene Kachnarsky grips your full attention by flinging widely open a few of the infinite portals of perception and awareness to consider why we feel the things we do, as he takes a "kid's-eye-view" look at the "grown-up" world. The intertwined tapestry of stories reveals the sublime, ridiculous, triumphant, and tragic ways in which ordinary people deal with the often extraordinary consequences of their choices and actions. These ironic and karmic accounts tell tales of love, crime, poverty, tragedy, greed and evil in a thoughtful, sometimes playfully humorous, youthful voice as they delve with wonder into the depths that lie beneath the surface of all things—in a quiet, sleepy metropolitan suburb.