Just a heads up, this episode includes descriptions of violence. Welcome to the Urban Legends Hotline, where we investigate the mysterious tales of your hometowns and stories passed through the old

lockard halls of your schools to get to the haunted heart of the urban legends that you grew up hearing and maybe even telling.

This week we are covering gang initiations and this is part two.

I'm your host Chelsea Weber Smith and from one friend of a friend to another, this is American

hysteria.

In late 1992 and

1992 and early 1993

tales of a gang initiation right known as Lights Out panicked Americans as faxes and emails were sent in towns and cities all across the country

with concerning messages like this one.

Police departments across the nation are being warned that this is the blood initiation weekend.

Their intent is to have all the new bloods nationwide drive around on Saturday and Sunday

nights with their headlights off.

In order to be accepted into the gang, they have to shoot and kill all individuals in the first

auto that does a courtesy flash to warn them that their lights are off.

Send this to everyone you know and you might save a life.

You've got mail.

At the end of part one, we talked about the months leading up to this scare about the

Rodney King riots Bill Clinton's self-serving publicization of Sister Soldiers comments that black gang members should

kill white people instead of their own and the untimely death of California school employee Kelly Freed in a shooting that closely mimicked the

lights out tail while actually having nothing at all to do with gangs, let alone some kind of initiation.

We covered several of these made-up gang rituals, and amazingly, just as lights out made its big debut, each one was brought back to life in a tangled

chaos of messy rumors, crisscrossing the entire nation.

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