Murderer who put human head on stick in woods.

[PennyM3]

Hi, this is a really obscure question. About 10 years ago a person in my class in high-school talked about how his mom collected strange stories from the newspapers, one of them he described as follows...

In America somewhere a father and son drove through the woods at night. They passed a house which had the lights on. A mile or so up the road the car broke down and the father told his son to stay in the car as he walked back to the house they saw. Much later somebody jumped onto the car roof and moments later the police showed up. They lead the boy out the car as they pointed guns at something on the roof. The boy looked back to see a killer holding his father's decapitated head on a stick.

That sounds like hockum or at the very least it's been exaggerated for shock value, but it was interesting at the time and I was wondering if there was something like that actually happened, if the story is based on fact.

[dot.hawkes]

I first heard this when i was at school, and the Monkees were in the charts so it is that long ago, it is one of those urban myth thingies, in the one I heard, the nutter was pounding the car roof with the severed head, I have heard it or read it a dozen times since with various slight changes, but it is a myth.

[Tatty Rollox]

..... it was the third standing man from the right at http://tinyurl.com/qcyee .....

[samuel23]

There used to be a scottish highwayman / robber / smuggler who was also a cannibal. He was called Sawney Bean. He is historical fact, but the story has been stretched over the years and he was supposed to have had a clan (married his sister and had loads of inbred kids or something equally as hideous) and he was supposed to have marked his home boundary with heads on poles.
There is also Vlad the Impaler - whom was reputed to do a similar thing, and on whom the Dracula legend was modelled.

[saxy_jag]

Urban myth. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, it happened on a road near us called Shady Lane, which runs past the site of a WW2 POW camp. Our one involved an elderly couple who ran out of petrol and he left her in the car whilst he walked back to the village for petrol.

Funnily enough, no-one seemed to be able to pinpoint exactly when it happened.

[violetblue]

It's an urban myth, nothing more. I have a book on the subject but can't find it among my stuff. It's not an unusual subject and your local library should be able to get you one. We used to tell each other these stories when babysitting!

[saanen]

Isn't there a film (cant remember the title) where this story is portrayed - it's a horror film, maybe one of Stephen Spielberg's

[sophie_1003]

urban legend maybe? thats where a character murders loads of people by re-enacting loads of urban legends/myths

[violetblue]

I've remembered the book; it's called The Vanishing Hitchhiker, is all about urban myths and includes the one you refer to (which may of course have been made into films in any case, but they're still urban myths). Note these stories always happen to a friend of a friend of a friend, or 'in the paper', they are false but very entertaining!

[warpig1]

Actually this is a true story. I know this for a fact as it happened to my friend's uncle's cousin's nephew's sister's husband's aunt' sborhter-in-law's son! So it must be true.

[PennyM3]

Well thanks everybody for confirming that it is a myth. I'm glad you all chipped in because it's amazing to hear how many of you have heard similar stories!

[Golden Shred]

Regarding Samuel's story of Sawney Bean his fifth daughter, Rhunna, ate Quizmonster's great-great-great grandmother.