In my hometown there was a regular flooding about every ten years, that put around one meter of water in the middle of the town. So they built a ‚big‘ (for that town) Damm to keep the water away.
They did make it just high enough to prevent a flooding for all but the floods that happen every 100 years.
Should that particularly high flooding come though, the Damm will break and the town will be gone.
That Damm is now about 50-80 years old, and floods will likely become worse with the climate catastrophe.
I think nobody knows what will happen if that ultra high flood occurs.
In 2002 Germany had one of its worst floods in centuries. Some towns were literally washed away, dozens of people were killed, billions in damages.
The federal and state governments paid for extensive flood protection programmes after that.
A friend of mine lived in a town who voted against it. The logic of these stupid yockels? The flood was a once in a century flood,so they should be good now. And a flood wall would impede the view, their historic downtown center wouldn’t be as nice anymore,etc. So they refused a flood protection system the community wouldn’t have to pay a dime for.
In 2013 there was a far worse flood. But damages while still substantial were far smaller than 2002. Because of the better protection in most places. The town my friend once lived in? It got flooded the second time, sued by its neighbouring towns because they got flooded from there.
One of the towns I grew up the longest in (I moved a lot as a kid) has a river running through it that Gary Ridgeway would dump his victims’ bodies. I lived about a 15 minute drive from one of the dumping grounds.
One of my elementary school friends also claims that an older siblings of theirs was murdered by ridgeway, but it hasn’t been officially confirmed.
There have been a few legendary explanations, which I forget, but Echo Point/The Center of the Universe in Tulsa is freaky.
There’s a pedestrian bridge going over the tracks downtown. Very cool place! One small spot is quite special.
If you stand on it and speak, you’ll hear your own words echoing in your ear. A listener 4’ feet away hears nothing unusual. You must stand on the flagstone, even 1’ away and you lose the effect.
I was literally going to mention the Center of the Universe lol. It’s got some crazy acoustics.
One of our haunted houses called the Hex House is based on a legend of a lady who kept a couple of women “hexed” as slaves in her basement. The police found them and the owner did jail time.
I'm originally from Long Island where we have a cursed lake. The story as it was told to me was that a Native American "princess" fell in love with a man who was either from a rival tribe or was a colonist (it varies on who's telling the story). Her father disapproved of the man and they had to meet in secret. Unfortunately, while crossing the lake to see her one night he ended up downing. In her grief she cursed the lake to take the life of of a man every year. Some variations of the story also have her committing suicide.
Our small town had their version of the "Seven Gates of Hell", with cattle guards acting as the gates. I didn't know where they were until I was in high school; I was out riding around with some friends one night when we decided to go through them. Imagine my surprise when we started driving down the dirt road that led to my house.
A local lady who lived next to a 4 way stop intersection out in the countryside called the nearest town’s police to complain that she could see that everyone was rolling through the stop signs.
The small town sent one of their 2 patrol cars, and parked up near the intersection to catch people. The story goes that the first person the police pulled over was the same lady who called in the complaint.
The officer realized this, and immediately got back in his car and drove back to town.
Other than that, some local farmers were said to have shot at people for walking on their land.
Donkey Lady, Midget Mansion, and the Ghost Tracks are probably the big 3 ghost story urban legends here in San Antonio. There are a bunch though, Chinese graveyard, robber baron cave, Dancing Devil, Fang Baby, Woman Hollering Creek/La Llorona, just to name a few.
Outside of Pittsburgh in North Park is Blue Myst Road. The story I heard is someone hung themself from an overhanging tree branch, and if you stop your car and honk 3 times it won’t start back up.
There are also two gravestones in a nearby cemetary that are leaning toward each other due to subsidance, that people say were forbidden lovers of some such, still yearning to make contact.
I don’t know if this fits the bill but, for several years, I heard the story of a man who had been released from an asylum and spent all his time on the sidewalk of a large road pretending to be a tree, raising his hands and fingers as if they were branches and bushes and would wave them in case of wind (also imitating their noise). He was nicknamed after a specific type of tree I don’t remember now
I’ve never met the guy, but it stuck with me since I heard the same story from various people who didn’t know each other
I’m from Sugar Land, Texas. If that sounds familiar, Steven Spielberg made a movie involving it called The Sugarland Express. It was also the home to the Imperial Sugar Company, long-time leading refiner and supplier of cane sugar in America.
The refinery that the city was founded around is gone now, but it was so old that the township of Sugar Land predates the statehood of Texas. The age of the refinery is important to note, because there used to be two refineries in the southern Texas territory back in those days.
The Story goes that the owner of Imperial Sugar, Samuel May Williams, who was also an American politician, somehow pissed off Santa Anna. As in leader of the Mexican Army, “Remember the Alamo” Santa Anna. He vowed to bring his army and burn Imperial Sugar to the ground in retaliation for the offense. Along the way they got turned around and he accidentally sacked the competing refinery instead. Imperial Sugar owes its existence to one of the most feared figures in early American history having a bad sense of direction.
There are a number of legends surrounding the pirate Klaus Störtebeker, who was active in the 14th century. The most popular one is probably that when he and his crew were facing execution, he made a deal with the mayor of Hamburg that if he manages to walk past any of his fellow prisoners after his beheading, they’d be spared. His headless body supposedly walked past eleven pirates until the executioner made him stumble. The mayor did not keep his word and all 73 members of the crew were killed.
There is a bridge north east of town, that if you stop and turn off the car, your car won’t start back up because a torso was found beneath it decades ago and the murder was never solved.
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