On the Chinese language Wikipedia for “campus legends,” there’s even an urban legend listed that in St. Viator’s Lake on the campus of St. Viator Catholic High School in Taichung, there is hidden a sister sword of King Arthur’s “promised victory sword”.
I couldn’t help but think that this was so funny! I Googled “promised victory sword”, only for this to come up as “Excalibur” in the “Fate” series of Japanese RPGs. So the person who came up with this urban legend didn’t know the name “Excalibur” or even “sword in the stone”. I asked my friend who went to St. Viator, he hadn’t heard of this urban legend either.
This kind of thing is obviously some kind of hoax. It’s very easy to just laugh it off. But I’m very curious as to how this urban legend began? I looked it up and it turns out, there’s a very detailed version of this urban legend, explaining why the “sword in the lake” would end up in a middle school. Of course, we don’t have to take the historical narrative claimed by the story seriously, anyone can tell it’s fake.
But more seriously, we can talk about why this urban legend would appear in St. Viator Catholic High School. For a “sword in the lake,’ there has to be a “lake.”
For this kind of story that you know is made up at a glance (Maybe using the term “promised victory sword” makes it more convincing), it’s very difficult for the story to spread elsewhere. As for the lake, this is a medium for the story to appear on a campus. Like you have the story about the female ghost who asks you the time because she drowned herself in the lake.
The first time I heard this kind of story was regarding “the women with the lantern” on the campus of Tamkang University. The story goes that two lovers were planning on eloping, but when it came to when they were going to meet, the man didn’t appear. So the woman threw herself into the lake on campus. After that, each dawn at 12 AM, the woman will appear waiting for her lover, asking “What time is it now?”
I originally thought that this was an urban legend specific to Tamkang University. Who would have thought that I later learned that there’s a similar urban legend about Drunken Moon Lake on the campus of National Taiwan University and Cheng Kung Lake on the campus of National Tsing Hua University? This has also led to derivative versions, such as that the clock tower by Cheng Kung Lake was built because the woman keppt asking questions about the time.
This story even spread to the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It’s hard to figure out at this point which version is the earliest, but these stories all have a shared point–the lake. These stories spread based on their similar structural basis, and so it’s easier to believe that it’s real.