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It’s October 3! The countdown to Halloween has started. At my house, Halloween is like Christmas. So, you’ll notice a larger-than-usual number of my posts this month will be focused on the creepy and macabre… starting with today! Today, we turn to Snopes to help us debunk (or validate!) a bunch of horror myths. I could probably spend an entire day perusing Snopes, but I’ll limit it to 8 today. (I apologize for the misleading banner)
1. Crazy people put razorblades in apples and needles in Halloween candy. Sadly, that’s true. There have been specific, documented cases about kids being pricked by needles hidden inside of Halloween candy. More than 80 cases have been recorded since 1959, but only 10 resulted in even a minor injury. The worst case was when one woman required a couple of stitches. In most cases, Snopes says, it’s usually because siblings or friends were trying to freak each other out. In 2000, though, a man in Minneapolis did put needles in Snickers bars and handed them out to kids he didn’t even know. One boy did get stuck, but not enough to require medical attention. The man responsible was charged with intent to cause death, harm or illness.
2. Crazy people poison Halloween candy. This one is NOT true. At least, not in the way you think. Most people would assume that someone like the above guy in Minneapolis would poison candy and hand it out to any little kid that shows up at his doorstep. Nope, no documented proof of that. But in 1974, Texan Ronald O’Bryan killed his own son and tried to make it look like he was given poisoned Halloween candy. He poisoned four Pixie Stix and gave one to his son and one to three other children – but not as the act of a random madman. He was just trying to make it appear random so he could blame this urban legend for his son’s untimely death. None of the other children ate their Pixie Stix, but Timothy O’Bryan did and was pronounced dead at 10 p.m. on October 31, 1974.
3. Bad guys hide under women’s cars in parking lots and slash their Achilles’ Tendons. We’ve all gotten that e-mail, right? This scary story has been lurking around since the 1950s and has seen a resurgence in recent years with e-mail chain letters. Snopes says that yes, people have definitely been attacked in shopping mall parking lots. But none of attackers were ever lying underneath the car, and there are no documented cases of them slashing the victims’ ankles.
4. We all know that The Amityville Horror was based on a true story… except it wasn’t.
Yes, Ronald DeFeo, Jr., did kill his entire family in that house, but no demons were involved. The family that bought the house after the DeFeos didn’t experience anything supernatural. William Weber, Ronald Jr.’s lawyer, admitted that he and the Lutzes completely fabricated the entire “haunted” story over a lot of wine. The author of the book, Jay Anson, built upon their tall tale and wrote the book.
5. A “bug bite” on a woman’s cheek ends up erupting with baby spiders – turns out a spider laid eggs under her skin. Nope. Not possible. There’s a short story about this legend (involving a kiss from the devil) that dates all the way back to 1849, so it’s an oldie. Apparently in 1998, a doctor in Mexico did tell a man that a bulge on his thigh could possibly be where a spider laid eggs, but no baby spiders ever erupted from it.
6. That song “Love Rollercoaster” originally done by the Ohio Players and later covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers incorporates the scream of a woman being murdered. Not true. Some rumors say that they killed a woman in the studio to get the scream; one said that microphones picked inadvertently picked up a murder next door; others said the band just used a 911 recording. Neither is true. Visit Snopes for a sound clip and you can listen for yourself to see if you think it sounds like someone being killed. The band kept mum on the rumors for a while to sell more records, but eventually admitted it was a just one of the singers reaching a high pitch. Not a murder.
7. People posing as the hanging victim at a haunted house have actually died… and the whole night passed before they were discovered. Yep, that’s true. It’s happened on multiple occasions, actually, and suicides have been mistaken for Halloween pranks as well. One such occasion happened on October 26, 2005. A 42-year-old woman committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree on a busy road, but no one reported it for hours because they assumed it was just a Halloween decoration.
8. People are drugged and then relieved of their kidneys, which are then sold on the black market for $10,000 each. That’s a negatory. And you’re thinking, “But wait, they’re also left in a bathtub full of ice.” Well, that’s only been added to the story since the mid ‘90s. The victim used to just be left along the side of a building or something. A Turkish man claimed that this exact thing happened to him in 1989, but it turned out that he willingly participated in the “surgery.”
Comments (14)
Comment
A few years ago, I discovered snopes, and about 8 hours later had devoured the whole, awesome site.
Here’s a creepy one that changed the way I load silverware into the dishwasher forever. They document three instances of people accidently falling onto the open dishwasher with the basket pulled out, and fatally landing on knives, scissors, or forks pointing up. I always load all silverware pointing DOWN now, even spoons.
posted by Johnny Cat on 10-3-2008 at 6:06 pm
I can confirm that one. My father was a fireman and had to respond to a call when a little girl dropped her doll over an open dishwasher then reached down to pick it up and fell onto a large knife. It is dangerous, you can slip and fall, do not put them pointing up.
posted by PartiallyDeflected on 10-3-2008 at 6:38 pm
Who would ever put them pointing up? That just doesn’t make sense to me at all. I mean, you don’t grab them by the points, you grab them by the handles. Which should be the parts pointing up, ready for your handy grasp.
BTW Snopes has come in very handy for debunking email myths around the office. Sadly, I work in a library, where people really should know better, but… they don’t.
posted by Mare on 10-4-2008 at 9:27 am
@Mare: Because that’s the part you eat off of, so you’d want it up to get properly clean, instead of shoved down all together in the silverware basket.
I always put sharp knives facing down, but regular silverware facing up.
posted by Celeste M. on 10-4-2008 at 10:50 am
As for #5 – it may not be true about spiders, but there is an insect called the Bot Fly that will plant eggs on mosquitoes, which can then be transferred under your skin and the larvae will happily live under your skin. They live in Central America and are gross!!
posted by j on 10-4-2008 at 11:05 am
I put most of my silverware facing up (aside from knives), but since my silverware basket is attached to the dishwasher door (and thus not facing upward), I think I’m safe from impalement.
Good article, Stacy. The Quick 10 is one of my favorites here on the _floss.
posted by nutmeag on 10-4-2008 at 11:16 am
Loved the article, but a few comments about the kidney part. I’m in med school and I can tell you that those things are hard to find because they’re actually beneath the fascia that most of your abdominal organs hang in, meaning that an inexperienced person would most likely destroy your liver, spleen, pancreas, and splanchnic nerves, so you wouldn’t just get up and walk away. Second, that is a picture of someone with situs inversus, a harmless, but cool, condition where all the major organs are flipped to the wrong side.
posted by Kid knee on 10-4-2008 at 1:20 pm
#5 can actually happen. I was there helping remove a spider sac from the inside of an elbow. The eggs were laid in his arm like the birth control sticks.
date pushing as a catchpa? someone’s having a bad month
posted by Lorelei on 10-4-2008 at 1:43 pm
The kidneys are so difficult to get to, due to being beneath the layer of connective tissue that most abdominal organs hang in, that you would almost certainly die from the trauma if anyone but a surgeon took one out. Also, that picture is of someone with situs inversus, a relatively harmless, but cool, anomaly in which all the major organs in your body are flipped.
posted by majka on 10-4-2008 at 3:13 pm
When I was a little girl in the mid-70s we had “love rollercoater” on 45 (!) and I was scared to even it look at it after my sisters told me about death scream.
My sisters also used to tell me that if I ever had a tapeworm, they would have to starve me for a long time, then hold food in front of my mouth and the tapeworm would crawl up my throat. Strangely enough, I ended up becoming a parasitologist :)
posted by Diana on 10-5-2008 at 9:15 pm
I was about to mention the story about a woman hanging herself in a tree on Halloween in 05- but you got to it. It happened in lower Delaware and scared the sh1t out of me. I’m from north DE, so I didn’t see it or anything, but its seriously crazy.
posted by Laura on 10-5-2008 at 11:03 pm
I want to say that earlier this year or maybe the end of last year there was a big story about some foreign surgeon who was hiring poor or out of work people to help “clean” in his offices and then would later bride them for their organs. I think in a few cases he was charges with drugging these poor people and just taking an organ or two. He didn’t slash ‘em and leave them in a bathtub but he was using repulsive means to sell organs on the black market. I seem to remember seeing it on a legit news site, but maybe the spooky season is messing with my memory. Anyone else remember that story??
posted by Jen on 10-6-2008 at 10:12 am
My Grandmother told me about the kidney thieves- my uncle picked on her about it because he knows it’s an urban legend,
posted by Sara on 10-6-2008 at 4:44 pm
I saw a short film/commercial once where a guy talks to the camera about “You know the story: Guy gets picked up at a bar, goes back to the girl’s hotel room, wakes up in a bathtub full of ice with his kidney gone.” He then proceeds, in a very matter-of-fact way, to explain that it was bunk because kidneys are the cheapest organs, so why not just kill the guy and take the whole shebang? And the whole time the camera is slowly panning back to reveal that he’s sitting in a motel room, putting organs into plastic bags, while his hot accomplice works at cleaning up in the bathroom. It all turned out to be a call for video submissions; the winner got a walk-on part in a horror film. You can see it at YouTube if you search for “urban legend Ziddio.com”
posted by Joanna on 10-7-2008 at 12:25 pm