Why Colombian Urban (and Horror) Legends Are Going Viral on TikTok

One corner of Colombian TikTok has quietly become one of the busiest spaces for horror storytelling. Searches such as La Patasola, La Llorona, and La Bola de Fuego have surpassed 40 million posts combined. Traditional Latin American horror narratives now rank among the platform’s most organically viral content.

Legends once passed down orally have used TikTok’s reach in Colombia to find new audiences and new storytelling formats. By late 2025, the platform reached more than 37 million adults in the country, equal to 93% of the connected adult population, according to its own measurement tools.

Colombians spend nearly nine hours a week scrolling through stories and testimonials on the app, more time than almost any other digital media category tracked in the country.

One legend that captures Colombian folk-horror’s viral energy is the “ghost bus.” Known as route G66, the story of a phantom TransMilenio route began circulating around 2014 and found new life on TikTok in recent years. TransMilenio, Bogota’s official bus system, carries roughly 2.9 million passengers daily. It does not operate between 2 and 3 a.m., the exact hours witnesses claim to have seen the route.

Creators have built real followings around this content. Account @thedarkside3222 posted a video retelling the legend of La Patasola, a story found across Latin America, drawing more than 120,000 likes and 400 comments. Accounts such as @.nataliacasgo, with more than 700,000 followers, have become audience favorites, turning oral tradition into ongoing serial storylines.

Researchers point to shared Latin American identity and storytelling as an explanation for this content’s success. Alcides Velasquez, a communication studies professor at the University of Kansas, has said Hispanic audiences turn to social media to build connections and consume audiovisual content. TikTok has described itself as a “window to the world” for Latino communities across all 50 U.S. states.

Latin American horror narratives on TikTok

Legendary figures such as El Mohan share the spotlight with brand-new legends, like a “ghost bus” said to haunt a Bogota transit route. Folk horror is not just a film trend. Colombians genuinely love the genre, embracing it across film, radio, television, and social media for decades.

The entertainment production chain has given Colombian legends a leading role. In the 1980s, a film movement called “tropical gothic” emerged in Cali, led by directors Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo. The movement’s masterpiece was “Pura Sangre” (1982), probably the most celebrated Colombian horror film of the last 50 years, which portrayed the urban legend of the Monster of the Mangones, an eccentric millionaire from Valle del Cauca department who needed young people’s blood to survive.

Even Colombia’s fascination with myths and legends reaches back to the very founding of vallenato as one of Colombia’s iconic genres. The legend of Francisco el Hombre and his duel with the Devil — an accordion showdown in which the man defeated the demon and founded the genre — finds an almost identical narrative parallel in the American legend of Robert Johnson and the birth of Rock&Roll, though no documented direct connection exists between the two. The first legend dates back to the 19th century, the second to the mid-1930s of the last century.

In 2011, Colombian radio station La Mega received a call during its late-night show that would help shape the country’s folk-horror canon. Host Daniel Trespalacios later described the call as unusually high-pitched, at first mistaking it for a prank. When his team reversed the audio, they heard a child’s voice pleading for her grandmother.

Colombians’ fascination with the supernatural is nothing new. What were once radio stories a decade ago are now viral TikTok content.