Episode 55: Creepypasta, Candyman, and the Caller Upstairs

Every generation grows up with its own set of whispered warnings — the stories told at sleepovers, around campfires, or in dimly lit basements when someone wants to raise the stakes. Urban legends are more than spooky tales; they’re reflections of the fears we carry, the dangers we imagine, and sometimes, the real events that mirror them a little too well.

In our latest episode of Super SUS, we dive into some of the most iconic legends of all time and explore the eerie ways they connect back to real-life cases.

As spooky season settles in, Amethyst and Ande peel back the layers of the myths we thought we understood, and it turns out the truth behind them is often scarier than the stories themselves.

Halloween candy has been the source of parental panic for decades, and the “Candyman” legend is a perfect example of how a myth can grow from a single grain of truth. The 1992 film Candyman taps into folklore from Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, but the real-world fears stretch in a different direction. While the idea of strangers tampering with candy has been widely debunked, there were two real “Candymen”: Dean Corll, the Houston serial killer whose family owned a candy company, and Ronald O’Bryan, the man who poisoned his own son on Halloween night in 1974. These cases weren’t tied to the film or the typical myth — but they fed the same deep-rooted anxieties about trust, innocence, and the dangers hiding in plain sight.

From there, we shift into the babysitter legend that practically raised an entire generation of horror lovers: “The call is coming from inside the house.” While there’s no single event that started it, real cases — like the 1950 murder of Janett Christman — echo the vulnerable, isolated terror at the core of the story. It’s the unease of being alone in a quiet house, responsible for someone else, with the creeping feeling that you aren’t as alone as you thought.

Then there’s Slender Man — one of the rare legends with a documented birthdate. Created online in 2009 as a piece of fictional folklore, he jumped from the screen into reality with the horrific Waukesha stabbing in 2014. Two young girls, convinced he was real, carried out an attack that stunned the country. It’s a chilling example of how a fictional monster can take root in the wrong mind at the wrong moment, blurring the line between myth and belief.

And of course, we couldn’t ignore the ever-present anxiety behind the “Killer in the Backseat.” Unlike Slender Man, this legend has no single origin point — instead, it grew from decades of scattered stories, crime fears, and the vulnerability of being alone in a car at night. It survives because it taps into something primal: the danger we can’t see, sitting just out of view.

Urban legends linger because they speak to the fears we don’t always say out loud — strangers, isolation, darkness, the unknown. They stay with us because they feel like they could happen. And sometimes, bits and pieces of them already have.

In this episode of Super SUS, we explore how these myths formed, the real cases that echo them, and why they continue to shape how we think about safety. It’s a journey into the stories that raised us, rattled us, and stayed with us long after the lights came back on.

If you’re ready to see where fiction meets something much more unsettling, this is the one to put in your queue.