Though we always talk about “urban legends”, it seems as though they’re different from legends about traditional ghosts and spirits. But urban legends are still just a form of folklore, so we can say that “urban legend” is just a form of classification. Taking this point of view, there’s not too big a difference between urban legends and traditional folk stories, or stories about ghosts and spirits.
To put it bluntly, if we really want to look at this closely, I don’t think there’s too much of a difference. Just after modernization, many people no longer believe that legends, folk tales, or ghost stories exist, or that these myths have been disproven. As such, urban legends need to be classified as a new category of understanding by humans.
So from my perspective, even if it’s about “ghosts”, as long as it’s modern and takes place in an urban setting, we can think of this as an “urban legend.” Because urban legends reflect the contemporary modernization of legends, not that they are fundamentally different from traditional folktales.
However, I believe that “modernization” has led urban legends to have different characteristics, such as the increasing similarity of urban legends internationally. (Maybe not too different from how city landscapes across the world all look similar if you’re looking down from a tall skyscraper). With the increasing similarity of cities across the world, it becomes more easy for the urban legends composed out of such landscapes to spread from city to city, almost like the spread of a parasitic organism.
Another important difference is the waning of belief in gods and deities. To use the example of folk religion in Taiwan, if you have a haunting by a ghost or demon, you can ask a god to exorcise the. But after modernity, people gradually don’t believe in gods. So who can exorcise ghosts and demons? Modern ghosts–well, I may have said just now that if they appear in cities, they can be thought of as urban legends, seeing as “ghost” is a traditional category that you can ask a god to exorcise. But what about “urban legends” born out of “modern” times? Is it that you can no longer exorcise them?
You can explain it this way. Why is it that in Japanese urban legends, you’ll have “unresolved” or “unanswered” scary stories? Like the story of Aka Manto–the Red Cape–in Japan, who asks you if you want red paper or blue paper on the toilet. No matter what you chose, he’ll kill you. Or the legend of Mary’s Telephone. If you pick up the telephone, you can’t escape.
The story of the Devil Fish–also known as the fish with the human face–in Taiwan is similar. Although there was only one case of this story, with the media spreading the story, this caused everyone knew the story. If you hear the Devil Fish talking to you, you have no way of solving the mystery, you can only wait for an unfortunate fate. This why these stories are scary. That there’s no “cure” or way to solve the “riddle” of these scary stories, I believe this is a special characteristic of urban legends