Urban legends in Ukrain

An Urban Legend
A friend of mine knows a family who were on vacation, driving through some remote part of the country in their station wagon. They had brought Grandma along even though she was quite elderly and not feeling well, because her heart was set on taking this one last trip with her grandchildren and they didn't want to disappoint her. Unfortunately, at some point during the long drive Grandma suddenly passed away in the back seat of the car. Her grandchildren, sitting on either side of her, became hysterical.
Since they were several hours away from the nearest sizable city, the father did the only thing he could think of to remedy the situation. He wrapped Grandma's corpse in a thick blanket, secured it to the luggage rack on top of the station wagon, and drove on.
When they finally reached the outskirts of civilization the father stopped at a service station and everyone clambered out of the car while he used a payphone to call authorities and report the death. Understandably nervous and upset, he didn't realize he had left the keys in the ignition.
When the family went back to the car they found it had been stolen, along with all their possessions... and Grandma.


This is a typical urban legend, which makes most people nervous, but stillsome of them get amused. This type of myths make an impact in people's behaviors and lifes, but not to everybody of course, mostly to supersticious people.

When people hear this, the first thing they would try not to do, would be to leave the keys in the ignition, an leave the car on, in the case of this urban legend or myth, but of course there are lots of them, all of them different and from different places.

In some cases these myths are used by parents or people in general, to scare others and make them do what they want; and I would think that in Ukraine, just like in any other part of the world, believers of these stories are mostly from small towns, or people from far away places, or from out of the country.

In other cases these myths are created and made up by people, not only to scare others, but to explain things they don't understand; they find in these stories maybe the answer they are looking for, or maybe the one they are trying to hear, but still it doesn't really matter the reason why they are created, the only one thing that's for sure is that it only takes one person to say something like this, for the rest of people to believe it, and start spreading it, because certainly gossip is the fastest mean of comunication, for good or for wrong, I don't know, an it's not my purpose to find that out, but the thing is that these type of stories, are spread among people just like butter is spread on bread.