FictionalWhite

Polybius: the arcade cabinet that never was

added30 August 2026

The story says that in 1981 a cabinet called Polybius appeared in the arcades of Portland, Oregon: no manufacturer's name on it, no usual queue — only children who afterwards suffered insomnia, seizures and gaps in their memory, and men in black who came to take readings off the machine. Not one photograph, not one board and not one document exists. The earliest written trace dates not from 1981 but from 2000, a post on an arcade collectors' site written almost twenty years after the "events".

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

A legend about the whole city — the pin is approximate

45.52025, -122.67419

Portland Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Polybius (urban legend) — Wikipedia

More in Portland

FictionalWhite

The Dybbuk Box

A wine cabinet listed on eBay in 2003 with a long description: supposedly it had belonged to a Holocaust survivor and contained a possessing spirit from Jewish folklore. The lot was resold repeatedly, each owner adding fresh misfortunes to the listing, the auction spread across the internet and eventually became a Hollywood film. In 2021 the original seller, the writer Kevin Mannis, publicly acknowledged that the whole thing was fiction he had written — a literary project that accidentally became a modern legend.

Everything in Portland →

Nearest on the map

FictionalWhite

The Dybbuk Box

0 km away

UFO sightingYellow

McMinnville and the Trent Photographs

On 11 May 1950 Evelyn Trent went out to feed the rabbits on a farm outside this Oregon town and saw a metallic disc drifting slowly over the field. She called her husband, who managed two photographs before the object went off to the west. The Trents did not try to profit: they finished the roll, left it at the local chemist, and the pictures reached a newspaper through a banker they knew. The frames have been argued over for decades — a 1969 analysis for the Condon Committee found no sign of a suspension or a montage, while later work points to a possible model hung on a wire under the power lines. They remain the two most famous photographs in the subject, and the argument has not closed.

53 km away

UFO sightingGreen

Mount Adams and the Watchers' Ranch

A volcano in southern Washington at whose foot the ECETI ranch has operated since the 1980s — a site people come to specifically in order to watch the sky. In summer dozens camp here with binoculars and cameras, and reports of lights come in every night. It is a rare case on this list of a place known not for one incident but for a continuous practice of watching. The explanation is simple and takes nothing away: the mountain stands well clear of any town, the sky is dark, and low-orbit satellites are visible to the naked eye in their hundreds after sunset. That suits the people who come: there genuinely is a great deal to look at.

119 km away

More: Fictional

FictionalOrange

The "Blue Whale"

The "Blue Whale" phenomenon (also known as "Death Groups," "f57," "Quiet House," or "Wake Me Up at 4:20") is a viral digital urban legend, an international moral panic, and a destructive social-media alternate reality game (ARG) that originated within the Russian-speaking web (principally the VKontakte platform) in late 2015. Between 2016 and 2017, the narrative of a clandestine syndicate of online "curators" systematically coercing hundreds of teenagers into self-harm across a 50-day sequence triggered massive public panic, prompted reforms in Russian criminal law, and gained global infamy as a supposed worldwide cyber threat.

FictionalWhite

The Blue Hand

The Artek International Children's Center (formerly the All-Union Pioneer Camp Artek) on the southern coast of Crimea near Gurzuf. Covering over 200 hectares beneath the slopes of Bear Mountain (Ayu-Dag), the world's largest youth camp complex functioned as the primary creative incubator for Soviet children's oral folklore. Here, around evening campfires and along the Black Sea shore, the quintessential Soviet camp creepypasta—the tale of the "Blue Hand"—was honed and passed down across generations.

FictionalGreen

The Black Grand Piano

Children's music schools, assembly halls of Soviet pioneer camps, and youth pioneer palaces (anchored symbolically by the Moscow Pioneer Palace on Sparrow Hills). Within Soviet juvenile subculture of the 1970s and 1980s, the classical instrument of bourgeois prestige and musical education transformed into the central artifact of an iconic urban horror legend: the "Black Grand Piano" (or "Black Upright"), which secretly drained the blood of young musicians.