The Legend of the Gold Coins

This is a typical horror legend of Córdoba. The story is about an old house in the center of the city that is said to be delighted and tells that in it a long time ago there lived a wealthy family that had a small daughter and several servants at her service.

One night while the girl was sleeping, she heard noises in the hallway, slowly opened the door of her room to look at the corridor that connected the rooms, enormously long and dark, full of paintings and tiling. At the end of the hall the girl saw what a boy of his age looked like, lifting one of the tiles and putting something into a hole in the floor. The girl could not believe it, what she saw shone in the boy’s hand as he passed through the dim light that came through the window were gold coins.

When the boy left he went out and headed there; Then one of the maids appeared with a huge candle that had also seen what had happened and wanted to take advantage. They decided that they would not say anything to anyone, every night they would approach and with the help of the candlelight they would lift the tile and take out the coins until they were finished. Every night the girl, who by its size fit inside, got into the hole under the tile and was giving coins to the maid, who was keeping them in a huge sack. One night in the middle of her work, the candle began to blink, wiping off, the maid told the girl to leave the hole, that they already had money to spare. The girl listened to him and left the hiding place, but at the last moment a coin fell from the sack to the hole and, in an act of greed and without even thinking about it,

The maid tried to grab her but could not, while yelling at her to please get out of there and leave the coin, but in the middle of that screaming the candle ended up going out. At the moment when the last ray of light came out of the candle, the tile closed before the maid’s eyes leaving the girl inside. The maid decided not to say anything to anyone, the parents took the girl for missing and the subject was forgotten over time.

But even today, in that house, the cries for help from the girl that repeat night after night in the hallway are still heard at night “Please … help … get me out of here …”.

Urban Legends

The Urban Legend of the Polybius Video Game

One of the most mysterious legends in the world of video games is one that states that there is an old game that caused amnesias and suicides among its players . The game in question was the Polybius, a kind of arcade appeared in 1981.

At the time, Polybius had an important success and many people were piling up in front of the machine waiting for their turn to play. However, after a few days, numerous players complained of suffering from amnesias, headaches, nightmares, insomnia and some even even attempted suicide.

Many are the urban legends that shot around the game: many said they saw men dressed in black suits taking notes of the players who scored the most. Others claimed to have seen “ghostly faces” running around the screen. There are also those who in the middle of the game have seen subliminal messages, among which the most prominent is “commit suicide.” Voices under the sound of the game, groans of panic, … the rumor spread.

Atari sheds some light on the matter by saying that the procedure used in both Tempest and Polybius, which consisted in spinning the scenery around a fixed element, could cause nausea among the players.