The Coffin on Wheels

The best-known Soviet children's horror story, told in pioneer camps after lights-out. A voice on the radio announces that the coffin on wheels has set off and is coming down the street, then into the yard, then up the stairs; the floors are counted aloud, and on the last line the teller grabs whoever is next to them. The device is purely theatrical — the whole structure exists for one second at the end, and the fear is generated not by the plot but by the countdown. The pin is at Artek as the country's most famous camp, but it was told everywhere.

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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.