Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

The Chicago River Hippo
Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2014.   Comments (0)

Quck Links: Grey Lady Ghost, etc.

  • Is this a picture of the Grey Lady Ghost of Dudley Castle? [Birmingham Mail]
  • Sondra Arquiett had agreed to help with a drug investigation as part of a sentencing deal, but didn't realize this help would include the DEA's use of her pictures to create a fake Facebook page. Now she's suing them. [BBC News]
  • Reports of an armed clown chasing students at Golden Valley High School are a hoax, says the principal. [Bakersfield Californian]
  • David LaVera's particular con is that he claims he was an actor in the Twilight movies. [KCCI]
  • Two teenage girls from Utah now admit that their story about being kidnapped back in September was a hoax. [Fox13now.com]
  • A fake blog about a blond child bride has become the most visited blog in Norway. [Smithsonian]
  • New York City is sending fake Ebola patients to emergency rooms to test hospital readiness. [CBS New York]
  • The contention of a $2 billion lawsuit filed recently in Chicago is that Aunt Jemima was a real person, and that Quaker Oats owes her descendants money. [takepart.com]
  • Montana authorities say they're not going to prosecute Toby Bridges (who's known as an "anti-wolf extremist") with running down two wolves, because they can't find any evidence that he did, despite his claims on Facebook to have done so. [Montana Standard]
  • The Twitter Death Machine. [USA Today]
Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2014.   Comments (0)

Making It Pleasant For The Horse, 1884
Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2014.   Comments (1)

Microsoft skips Windows 9
Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2014.   Comments (1)

Russians worship Jesus tree
Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2014.   Comments (0)

Quick Links: Ebola Zombie Victim, etc.

  • A viral picture apparently showing a Liberian Ebola victim who had 'risen from the dead' is actually a screenshot from the film World War Z. [mirror.co.uk]
  • Amy Argetsinger argues that it's time to bury the idea that Andy Kaufman faked his own death [washington post]
  • Craig Silverman offers an in-depth analysis of that pumpkin spice condom hoax from a few weeks back [digg.com]
  • The Great Exhibition Toilet Myths (such as that "the public toilet was invented by the plumber George Jennings, for the Great Exhibition of 1851") [Yale Books Blog]
  • News article from 1909 claimed that a pen made from the headboard of EA Poe's coffin kept writing the word "Lenore" backwards [Haunted Ohio]
Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2014.   Comments (0)

Added to the archive: The Plainfield Teachers
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2014.   

The Cheerleader Poops
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2014.   Comments (8)

Self-Castrating Beavers
Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014.   Comments (1)

October snow in New Jersey?
Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014.   Comments (0)

Sasquatch Watching a Passing Train
Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014.   Comments (0)

Feejee Mermaid For Sale
Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014.   Comments (0)

Artist makes millions selling invisible art
Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2014.   Comments (0)
Emergent — An article in the NY Times briefly profiles Emergent, a new website created by Craig Silverman which aims to track the dissemination of rumors online. It records how many shares a rumor has received, and also assesses whether the rumor is true, false, or unverified. Looks like a very useful site!

The NY Times article notes that the problem with false rumors is that "they're often much more interesting than the truth." Therefore, they get more widely shared. The challenge, says the Times, "is to make the facts as fun to share as the myths they seek to replace." Nice goal, but I don't see it ever happening. The false rumors can endlessly transform themselves to appeal to our deepest hopes and fears. Whereas the facts always have to remain boringly factual.
Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2014.   Comments (0)
Asahi Shimbun Corrects Itself — The Asahi Shimbun (circulation 7.6 million) recently issued some corrections. It was not true, despite previous statements, that writer Seiji Yoshida had kidnapped 200 women during World War II to act as "comfort women." Apparently Yoshida made up his claims.

Nor was it true that workers at the Fukushima plant had disobeyed orders and fled the plant during the nuclear disaster. The newspaper misinterpreted documents.

Finally, it wasn't true that the paper had interviewed the president of Nintendo. The paper had lifted responses from an interview published on the Nintendo website and passed them off as an Asahi Shimbun interview. iMediaEthics
Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2014.   Comments (0)

Trump Honors Serial Killers
Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2014.   Comments (2)
The Cyranoid Illusion — The Cyranoid Illusion, named after the French play Cyrano de Bergerac, refers to a person who is not speaking their own thoughts, but rather the thoughts and words of another person fed to them via radio transmitter. A recent experiment has found that people can't tell when they're speaking to a Cyranoid, probably because our brains haven't evolved to detect when a person is speaking through the body of someone else. The problem is, the online world is full of Cyranoids. "From online games to online dating sites, people act through virtual versions of themselves (or assumed virtual identities) more and more." [wired.com]
Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2014.   Comments (0)

The return of the Kingswinford Hoaxer?
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014.   Comments (0)

Jasmine Tridevil Costume
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014.   Comments (1)

Gestations - the Pregnant Women’s Bar
Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014.   Comments (0)
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