The easiest way to make a story engaging is to personalize it, to say “this is something that happened to me”. Everyone knows this on some level. Urban legends happen to “a friend of a friend” because, just by adding that phrase, you have made the story twice as interesting as one that happened to someone to whom you have no link at all.

It reminds me of the beginning part of this video from Good Will Hunting:

The top-rated story is about Dashrath Majhi. The nearest town to get treatment for his wife was 70km. She died as a result of her illness and Majhi decided that distance would no longer be the reason that some one that did not get the help they needed:

From Wikipedia:

Dashrath Manjhi’s claim to fame has been the herculean task of single-handedly carving a 360-foot-long (110 m), 25-foot-high (7.6 m) and 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) road by cutting a mountain of Gehlour hills with a hammer, chisel and nails working day and night for 22 years from 1960 to 1982. This passage reduced the distance between Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district from 70 km to just 7 km.

(via Kottke

As an example, an interesting story comes to mind. I once read in a psychology publication about a young mother who always slices the ends off the meat loaf before placing it on a dish to serve her family: she doesn’t know why she does it —only because her mother did it that way. When her mother is asked why she sliced off the ends of the meat loaf before serving the family, she only knows that her mother did it that way. When the elderly grandma is asked why she sliced off the ends of the meat loaf before serving it to the family she answers that she sliced the ends off to make it fit into the only serving tray she had at the time. Namaste.