Like a gazelle to the slaughterhouse, the young woman drives alone down a dark highway.

Suddenly, a pair of headlights blaze to life behind her, like the shining yellow eyes of a ravenous predator. With a nervous glance into her rearview mirror, she accelerates from the truck that stalks her. It matches her pace. The high beams flash, momentarily blinding her. She looks again, sees the headlights are bearing down like a pair of God's own glowing Hunting Orbs, drawing murderously closer in the night.

The woman's heart thumps the terrorbeat of the hunted. A cool sweat breaks out on her skin. She turns off the highway, onto a lonely country road. The truck follows. The chilled hands of naked fear grope her breasts.

Frantic, she turns from the lonely country road to an even more lonely country road, and the truck continues to follow.

Her naked fear turns to naked terror when the truck begins flashing its high beams at her every few minutes. Any remaining doubt that the truck is following her disappears seconds later, when she turns off the second country road onto a hidden road that only she knows about, which she built herself for situations just like these.

When she finally arrives home, the truck is close behind. It pulls into the driveway right behind her. She honks her horn in terror until her father runs out of the house, threatening to call the police on the truck driver.

"You should,” he explains. "For him!"

"Wha?" says the woman, flabbergasted.

"Buh?" says the father, spit-taking coffee all over the front of his shirt.

The truck driver points to the backseat of the woman's car, where a man crouches behind the driver's seat… licking a knife. “I am a rapist and a murderer,” he confirms.

The truck driver explains that he saw the man hide in the car when he stopped for gas, then decided to follow the young woman. He even flashed his high beams whenever the man in the backseat sat up to attack the girl.

The killer, afraid of being seen, had ducked back down every time.

Don't look now, but I just blew your mind.

The “Backseat Killer” Legend's been scaring the shit out of ten-year-olds around campfires for over 30 years. Like any good urban legend, it has grains of truth sprinkled here and there from various real-life incidents. But while it's good for a late-night scare, people in general took it about as seriously as you'd take anything told to you by someone drinking vodka with Tang and toasting weiners over a fire, which is to say not very.

Then, somewhere along the way, a company named AOL figured out how to make the internet easy enough for mouth-breathing simpletons to use, and the email forward was born. Within minutes, preposterous urban myths began a new life online as real-life incidents, selflessly forwarded to your inbox so you could educate yourself about the next moves of terrorists, know where to send your bank account numbers to help imprisoned African princes relocate their millions, and of course avoid getting killed by backseat murderers.

Most “Backseat Killer” forwards ended with a variety of frantic warnings, ranging from the sensible (“Always lock your car doors!”) to the slightly paranoid (“Always jam a broom under your car to check for murderers suction-cupped to the bottom!”) to, as can be expected with the internet, completely eye-crossingly insane (“Backseat murder epidemic! Your girlfriends, wives and mothers are among the walking dead! Forward this to every female you know, or you may as well have pulled the trigger on them yourself! You heartless child-smothering bastard!")

The Urban Legend Database isn't trying to steer you wrong here: certainly it’s never a bad idea to be on the lookout for murderers. However, if you find yourself dismantling the chassis of your car before reentry to ferret out any rapists hiding in the wheel wells, it’s possible you have issues that forwarded warnings are simply not equipped to handle.

“Well, that’s fine for you to say,” you retort. “But how am I supposed to separate fictional email forwards from actual forwarded warnings, smarty-pants?”

The answer to that is actually so simple that it may shock you. Consequently, I urge you to sit down first.

Perhaps you'd better shut off the Hotmail altogether and put those credit cards away, Lex Luthor. You should conserve your super-genius for your battles against the forces of good.

An urban legend is only as good as its ability to make you think "holy shit, that could happen to me!" So a myth involving a box of duct tape falling off a pallet and crushing a forklift operator to death, for example, might get heavy play in duct tape pallet loader circles, yet still be unlikely to catch on with the general public, where loading slats of duct tape is at best kept in the realm of amateur slat-loading enthusiasts.

The best urban legends, in other words, must get the same reaction from everyone who hears them. To do this, a good urban legend must A) horrify you with the belief that it could happen to you; B) confirm your worst fears that anyone you don’t know is a cackling psychopath actively plotting your death; and if possible, C) be punishingly, punishingly stupid.

In all three of these categories the “Backseat Killer” Legend excels. Its uplifting message that all women should live in continuous unthinking terror of men is as possible as it is implausible, painting as it does the picture of a nightmare world where every stranger is simply a friend who hasn’t murdered you yet, leaving your carcass in a park to be pecked at by crows.

But the true power of the “Backseat Killer” Legend lies in its versatility. In some versions the heroine is attacked while stopping for gas, pulled behind the station by the attendant to be (she presumes) raped and killed… then told by the attendant that while filling up the tank, he spotted a murderer licking a knife in the back seat.

In other versions the heroine’s gasoline needs are sated. She sticks to the road, but is nearly driven off of it by a maniac (presumably for the purposes of murder and rape)… only to be pulled from the car by her assaulter, who reveals a murderer licking a knife in the back seat.

However, whether our heroine’s at a gas station, cruising down the freeway or lugeing down an icey slope with the murderer hiding in the back, every variation on the legend has the character of the Presumed Murderer/Rapist, who acts all murdery/rapisty at first, but then reveals he was saving our heroine all along. The moral? We should always trust strangers who act like they’re about to fuck and kill us, since the likelihood that they’re actually trying to save us from back-up rapist killers is immensely high.

Or maybe: You can throw a rock and hit someone about to have forced sex with your corpse, perhaps. Or, because flashing high beams at the killer seems to stop him dead in his tracks: All murderers are vampires.

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