The Creepy Truth Behind 10 Urban Myths

The Legend

There is a monster that lurks in the tunnels beneath the city. It is said that it began life as a little boy's pet lizard, but one day the boy got tired of it and flushed it away. It has survived in the sewers, living off rats and growing to 10 times its normal size.

If you don't eat up all of your greens, it will crawl up out of the toilet to get you.

The Truth

The idea of mutant alligators roaming the under-city has been around for decades and so far not many have come up through people's plumbing.

However, something occasionally gets dredged up from the depths that looks for all the world like an alien lifeform, come to discover us via our excrement.

A video recently appeared online showing a large amorphous blob of something clinging to a sewer wall and pulsating ominously. Experts were stumped as to what it was and a rumour quickly began to circulate that it was some new form of life that would surface and absorb us all to gain our life force a la The Blob.

It turns out that it was a colony of relatively harmless, if not completely revolting, worms. The worms will retreat from bright light, giving the impression of a contracting muscle when the camera's light shines on them.

Slightly more alarmingly, there have been many reports in Tehran of enormous, mutant rats coming up out of the sewers. These rats are sometimes bigger than a human baby and, in some places, have needed a crack team of snipers to keep them under control.

What exactly is present in Tehran's sewers that allow the rats to grow this large is not known, so all the locals can do for now is hunt them down and hope that they don't start carrying off their newborns.