The Black Volga
A black car with no plates, sometimes with white curtains or red tyres, that drives around the city taking children. The legend circulated across the Eastern Bloc from the 1960s to the 1980s — in the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Hungary — and in each country somebody different was behind the wheel: state security, priests, foreigners, vampires. The Volga itself was not chosen at random: an official car, unavailable to an ordinary person, and therefore the country's most recognisable symbol of an authority you cannot hail.
The Black Hand and the Red Spot
Two stories from the same body, usually told back to back: the black hand that reaches out from under the bed or out of the wall, and the red spot on the ceiling that grows every night until it swallows the people living there. Both work the same way — the threat comes not from outside but from the flat itself, from the furniture and the walls, which is the one place a child cannot get away from. Folklorists have recorded them in many variants across the Soviet Union since the 1960s, and they remain the most durable layer of children's urban folklore.
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