There’s something about a scary story that is improved by the chance that it just – might – be true. That maybe it happened to a friend – or to a friend of a friend – that gives it power that makes it believable.

But really, if you do the research, as Jan Harold Brunvand does – or the good folks over at snopes.com – you find that friend didn’t really experience it, it was really someone they knew. And when try to track down the friend of your friend, or find the graveyard where the hitchhiker vanished – the more you look, the less there is there.

A lesson a lot of people could learn now.

I have a bunch of Jan Harold Brunvand’s books – The Choking Doberman, Curses Broiled Again, The Mexican Pet, The Baby Train – and they all kind of follow the same formula. These aren’t books you can sit down and read one right after another, like Agatha Christie. Reading them are a little like reading the second volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

And they are similar: collections of folktales, the stories we tell each other, stories we heard on the street. The man with the hook in lover’s lane. The babysitter on drugs who microwaves the baby and puts the turkey in the crib. The girl whose hand gets licked by the serial killer hiding under her bed.

Now many of these stories have been coopted by the movies – Scream, Friday the 13th – and by the internet. The vanishing hitchhiker has nothing on Slenderman.

One of the interesting things that Brunvand revealed was the history of these stories. We imagine the hitchhiker vanishing from the back seat of a car, her prom dress like our dress or maybe our mother’s or grandmothers. But the story can be traced back to a time where the person who gives the hitchhiker a ride is driving a horse-drawn wagon.

Which is one lesson everyone should have learned 20 years ago, and four years ago: a lot of the stuff you learn on the internet is urban legend.

It feels like somewhere along the line, we lost our healthy sense of skepticism. We’ve replaced it with “doing our own research” online and getting sucked down rabbit holes until we believe unhealthy stuff that is just untrue.

So let’s all read The Vanishing Hitchhiker and stop believing stuff that isn’t true.