While the stories that attach to the sites of legend tripping vary from place to place, and sometimes contain a kernel of historical truth, there are a number of motifs and recurring themes in the legends and the sites. Abandoned buildings, remote bridges, tunnels,caves, rural roads, specific woods or other uninhabited (or semi-uninhabited) areas, and especiallycemeteries are frequent sites of legend-tripping pilgrimages.
Legend-tripping is a mostly harmless, perhaps even beneficial, youth recreation. It allows young people to demonstrate their courage in a place where the actual physical risk is likely slight.[3] However, in what Ellis calls "ostensive abuse," the rituals enacted at the legend-tripping sites sometimes involvetrespassing,vandalism, and othermisdemeanors, and sometimes acts ofanimal sacrifice or otherblood ritual.[4] These transgressions then sometimes lead to localmoral panics that involve adults in the community, and sometimes even themass media. These panics often further embellish the prestige of the legend trip to the adolescent mind.[3] In at least one notorious case, years of destructive legend-tripping, amounting to an "ostensive frenzy," led to the fatal shooting of a legend-tripper nearLincoln, Nebraska followed by the wounding of the woman whose house had become the focus of theostension.[5] Thepanic over youthSatanism in the 1980s was fueled in part bygraffiti and other ritual activities engaged in by legend-tripping youths.[3]
^Peter Monaghan, "The Surprising Online Life of Legends"The Chronicle of Higher Education Dec 12, 2011[1]
^abcEllis, Bill. "Legend Trips and Satanism: Adolescents' Ostensive Traditions as 'Cult' Activity." InThe Satanism Scare, ed. James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, 279-95. NY: Aldme DeGreyter
^Ellis, Bill (July 1989). "Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder".Western Folklore.48 (3):201–220.doi:10.2307/1499739.JSTOR1499739.
^Summers, Wynne, L. "Bloody Mary: When Ostension Becomes a Deadly and Destructive Teen Ritual."Midwestern Folklore 26 (2000):1 19-26.
^Kinsella, Michael (2011).Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.ISBN978-1604739831.
What's in a coin? Reading the Material Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities (2007), by Donald H. Holly and Casey E. Cordy. The Journal of American Folklore 120 (477):335-354.
Debies-Carl, Jeffrey S.If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. 312 pages.ISBN1496844122
