Snopes.com is probably the best-known and most comprehensive website relating to American Urban Legends. In addition to serving as a repository for established or classic urban legends, the site also tries to validate and/or debunk newly reported urban legends, internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other recent stories of uncertain origin. The founders of the site have even invented fake urban legends to test whether the general public would be gullible enough to accept them as real (which in at least one case it apparently did).
According to its Frequently Asked Questions page, the site also analyses common fallacies, political misinformation, old wives’ tales, unusual news stories, celebrity gossip, and similar types of items. It also points out that an urban legend may or may not be based on a real event, but that what really matters is whether large numbers of people believe it to be true.
When I looked over the Religion section of the site, I found stories about such subjects as a phone call from God, California students being forced to pray to Allah, lightning striking a church during a sermon about the wrath of God, a purported attempt to make a clone of Jesus, and scientists drilling a hole almost all the way down to hell and hearing the screams of the damned as they were being tortured down below.
To visit this website, go to Snopes Urban Legends. In addition to the legends, there is also a glossary and a page of odd news stories.
