Mrrzy: Your stories about your classmates sound like the kind of thing discussed in this thread: BS: My claim to fame - what's yours?. They don't really qualify as the kind of legend I had in mind, because they either (1) come from your personal experience rather than hearsay, or (2) don't tell a story of something that a famous alumnus/alumna allegedly did.

I'm more interested in those stories about Edgar Allan Poe. Can you tell one? Have you ever tried to confirm any of those stories by looking them up in a biography? What I'm trying to get at here is folklore.

Poe is a tough case, though, because lots of material has been published about him, and unless you're familiar with all of it, you can't classify any particular story as folklore. That is, you can't tell whether the story was passed down orally from one student to another for a long time, or whether someone recently got the story from a book.

Spaw: Your story is closer to what I had in mind, but interestingly, instead of "cutting a great man down to size" it builds him up!