fact
The statistic that more people are killed by falling coconuts than by shark attacks is an urban legend, that gained momentum when in 2002 the director of the International Shark Attack File, falsely claimed that falling coconuts kill 150 people each year, compared 5 shark attack deaths.
The post The statistic that more people… appeared first on Crazy Facts.
I was flipping through the TV channels recently and I happened upon a show on National Geographic about the many conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination.
I have no answers or ideas really, but every single time I come across anything to do with what might have happened in Dallas on that day in 1963, I’m immediately sucked in.
And I know I’m not alone on that one!
People on AskReddit discussed the mysteries they want to know all about. Let’s take a look.
“Some animals can’t see color cause they don’t have the right organs for it.
What are all of the aspects of life we’re missing out on cause we don’t have the organs to perceive them?”
“The truth from when my gran died and the weeks leading up to it. She died on the 6th of December.
She cancelled her life insurance just days before her death Wrapped every single present for the whole family and name tagged them (over 30 family members) when she usually wrapped them on Xmas eve She worked in a small gift shop along with the owner- both of them died within 3 hours of each other.
Has puzzled me for years and hopefully some truth comes out before I pass away.”
“The Panama Papers.
LOADS of wealthy people involved and murders attached to it, also.”
“What deep sea creatures exist that we haven’t found yet?
Just how big is the largest squid out there?”
“I gotta go with the first ever unsolved mystery that really made me think. Mystery of the Somerton Man.
In 1948 a guy was found dead on a beach in Adelaide, Australia. He was never identified and months after finding his body they found a fake pocket in his pants. It was torn from a copy of the book Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam (I googled that) and had a phrase on it which said “Tamam Shud” which means ended or finished in Persian.
They found the book that it came from but the owner denied ever knowing the guy. There was an encrypted message in the book that they found and it still hasn’t been cracked. Apparently there’s been a development recently that might identify him as H.C. Reynolds but it’s not 100% certain.
It’s super interesting.”
“Jennifer Fairgate/Fergate.
It’s a fascinating mystery – a woman checks into the Oslo Plaza Hotel, a five-star establishment, and is found dead in her room three days later. Initially assumed to have committed a suicide, but there’s no blood on her hands, no gunshot residue, no fingerprints on the bullets in the gun or the gun itself, which in addition to the odd position in which she is found on her bed really starts looking more like homicide.
Additionally, no personal belongings in the room besides clothes, shoes, a travel bag and an attaché full of bullets. Clothes and shoes have all producer labels/designations removed as well.
Contents of her stomach indicate that she had died the day before she was found, but a member of staff who knocked on her door heard a gunshot go off right after that, indicating someone’s presence inside.
The door was also locked from the inside but no one was there when they got in. Probably my favourite true crime thing.”
“One day grandfather just walked out the door and never came back.
This was before I was born. He left behind my grandmother and his three children. There was a state-wide search. My mom’s family never got closure.
Although, I think he might’ve had another family that he ran away to. But it still baffles me sometimes at night. My grandmother finally held a pseudo-funeral/memorial for him last year.”
“I wanna know if they kept going at it with the MK Ultra thing and how they do it now if it is.
Everything we know about it comes from 20,000 files that were misplaced, causing them to be missed when they attempted to destroy all documentation of the program.”
“The Korovina Group.
Basically a group of seven hikers start hiking the mountains when six of them start bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth. They all scream, start seizing, one even starts bashing their head on a rock. The remaining survivor flees, but later comes back to the bodies to get supplies. She’s found a few days later but refused to talk about it
A lot of people say its a deadly nerve agent that Russia was using (this happened in Siberia? I think) but that doesn’t explain why the last one survived, even going back and still being unaffected.”
“Harold Holt (Australian Prime Minister in the 1960’s) ‘disappeared’ while swimming at the beach.
He was never found.”
“A man only a year older than me went missing in my town, right near my place of work a few years ago. He just disappeared. I remember seeing the missing posters and the police conducting searches.
It has been several years and he is still listed as missing. I think about him from time to time and wonder whatever happened to him. I’d want to know about him.
There are so many cases like his, I hope his family and the other families one day get answers.”
“The Yuba County 5
5 young mentally handicap men went missing. They were gone for months thout any clues other than a few mysterious phone calls saying not to look for them. Their vehicle was found up on a mountain road a few days after they went missing. It turned on and ran perfectly fine
They were finally found in a trailer deep in the mountains,the strange thing was the one full corpse that was found starved and froze to death when there was plenty of food, water and heat in the trailer to last all 5 boys a year.
Some of the food had been eaten showing that they hadn’t had a problem accessing the food. While they did have impairments, they were all independent and would have know how to turn on the heat and get food, call for help.
To add the mystery rhe 5th man’s body was never found and while the others were cognitively impaired he suffered from schizophrenia and had several disturbing incidents leading up to their disappearance.
The full corpse that was found was wearing this man’s shoes, but wasn’t him, the corpse had been wearing boots the night they disappeared and its believed that the man either stole them or talked the other young man into giving him his boots.
What happens to the 5th man? Why did the man in the trailer starve to death surrounded by food. Why did the other men leave the trailer and die just 100s of feet away from it when there was food and warmth so close.
Why did they leave the car to begin with? Why didn’t they follow the trail back to the road?”
Are there any urban legends you want to know the truth behind?
If so, tell us all about it in the comments.
Please and thank you!
The post If You Could Learn the Truth About One Mystery, What Would You Choose? appeared first on UberFacts.
I love all kinds of mysteries, urban legends, and conspiracy theories.
Even if I don’t really believe in a particular story, I still think they’re fascinating to read about…and there are a ton of them out there to dive into.
What unsolved mysteries would you like to know the truth behind?
Let’s get weird with some folks on AskReddit.
“I wanna know what happened to Louis Le Prince, the true inventor of the film camera.
Boarded a train but never left it.
No body found.”
“I would want to learn the truth around the Mothman and what people were seeing in the days leading up to the bridge collapse.”
“Assuming he died (are we allowed to learn two truths about one mystery?), where did most of D.B. Cooper’s ransom money end up after he jumped from that airplane?
I believe the FBI lets you keep it if you find it, as long as you give them a chance to analyze it for latent prints/DNA first.
Those bills must be worth a fortune to a collector. Even if they aren’t, I’ll still get tens of thousands of dollars in cash. Who doesn’t want that?
So, I get my name in the papers for finding Cooper’s money, and I get a nice chunk of change to keep. A double-whammy of good fortune.”
“Who wrote the Voynich Manuscript and why? And why was it written encoded or in an unknown language?
I like learning about weird mysteries in history and this is one that remains unsolved to this day despite quite extensive research through the centuries.”
“There is this famous case in France where a bourgeois family was killed, except the father who disappeared.
He is of course the prime suspect, as the events they have reconstructed suggest he got the oldest son back home himself to kill him after the other family members has already been murdered. He buried them all under the terrace and they weren’t found right away, so he got a “head start” so to say.
It’s been years and no one knows what happened to him. There have been plenty of sightings, all over the country, but he looks very average and forgetable. A few years back, they thought they got him on a flight in (from?) Scotland, and didn’t show his picture until a few days later… and everyone who knows about the case wondered wtf was the police thinking, because the man who was arrested looks nothing like him.
Anyway, I’d like to know what happened to him and if he really did it. I have little doubt he did, but he went to such length to cover his tracks, sending letters to family members saying he and his family were relocating under witness protection in the US, or suggesting he was involved in a big case and couldn’t disclose his location etc…
Some people even believed the people buried in his yard were not his real family but morgue corpses with elements of DNA to link it to the family so they could escape/fake their death.
Netflix did an episode on it in their remastered Unsolved Mysteries (Season 1) if you want to know more about the case, it’s really interesting.”
“So many rabbit holes to go down.
What did they find in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947
Who killed Jon Benet Ramsey?
Who was the Zodiac Killer?
What happened to Walter Collins?
Who killed the Black Dahlia?
Where or what happened to Flight 370?”
“The Jon Benet Ramsey one just sits on my brain sometimes!
She was born the same year as my little brother so when she died it was so hard to not be caught up in it.
It really bugs me that we still don’t have a definitive answer of who did it.”
“There are so many that I wonder about.
Did the British intentionally let the Germans sink the Lusitania to bring the US into WW1?
Did FDR have advance warning of Pearl Harbor, but did nothing?
What really happened to Hitler’s remains after he killed himself?
What really happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald to cause her to sink?
What caused the Moorgate Crash?
But probably above all else, the one I always wonder about:
What happened to that kid I witnessed being kidnapped when I was 7, and my parents forbade me from talking to the police about?”
“The Zodiac Killer.
Not just his identity. His psychology, his motives, his planning, his affiliations.
I want every detail of that sh*t.”
“The Max Headroom signal 1987.
I want to know…
Some people who worked in the television industry at that time have said that it was impossible for an outsider to pull it off.
It had to have been done by someone who was knowledgeable about TV signals and had access to all the equipment, which wasn’t publicly available in 1987.”
“The disappearance of Lars Mittank in 2014. Read about it somewhere years ago and it still bothers me sometimes.
I try to sum it up: German tourist is on vacation in Croatia, gets into a little bar fight over soccer, gets injured on his ear. Doctor tells him not to fly until fully recovered, friends leave without him after he insists, that he’ll be fine without them.
He checks in into a hotel and suddenly shows serious signs of Paranoia and one day later he calls his mother, whispering that he is being followed by four men, that are trying to kill him. After some time, he can finally fly back and enters the airport, seemingly “back to normal”. This is covered by the airport cameras.
He even talks with someone inside the airport like everything’s normal. He then leaves the camera angle for a second with all of his luggage in his hand and just seconds later he runs full speed out of the airport, leaving his luggage behind just like that. In front of the airport he stands there shortly like he is looking for something, then he continues to run in a specific direction, clips over a decently high fence and disappears in a sunflower field and is never seen again, nor is his body.
The most realistic scenario is that he had some kind of concussion or brain damage from the hit that injured his ear, but his friends described him as perfectly normal after the incident. There are so many things weird and not fitting in this case.
Most of the media coverage is in German unfortunately but if you’re really interested I am sure you’ll find a more detailed article or video about it in English.”
What unsolved mysteries would you like to know the truth about?
Talk to us in the comments!
We’d love to hear from you!
The post People Discuss the Mysteries, Urban Legends, or Conspiracy Theories They Want to Know the Truth Behind appeared first on UberFacts.
Most cities have at least a few creepy urban legends.
And thankfully people from all over the world can come to Reddit and share theirs for all the online world to read.
The following 12 people have heard some s**t, and now you can read it!
Let’s take a look!
“In Wichita, there is a bridge, Theorosa’s bridge. There are a few versions of the story, but most of them tell that there once was a woman who had an illegitimate baby, and she threw the baby off the bridge into the water to be rid of it.
Full of grief and regret, she then jumps in after the baby and drowns herself. Supposedly, if you go to the bridge and yell loudly that your are Theorosa’s child or that you have her child, she will appear and drown you in the river.”
“We have the Watchers. The story (that I have heard) is that their daughter was kidnapped and murdered decades ago and the family completely snapped. They boarded up their windows and installed CCTV stuff and now they watch not just their yard but their whole street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they think someone is suspicious they will run out of the house with a weapon and attack.
The Watchers are completely legit, it’s pretty much a rite of passage in my area and they DO come running out after you. I’ve done it twice, both times in a car, and once they came out running with a bat and another time they came out with a knife. No idea what really compels them, especially since this has (supposedly) been going on since the 70s or 80s, but it’s real.
It isn’t a rural area, either- it’s just a house on a normal California street. I know their (new) next door neighbors, too. Nobody knows what their deal is.”
“Shades of Death Road is actually located about five minutes outside of my town. A lot of people get really into it and insist that they see ghost on the side of the road.
I remember my teacher telling me it was a really old road and people used to hide behind the trees on the side of the road and murderer them and have an old fashion GTA. There is also a lake next to the road called Ghost Lake. I love that road and lake. I’ve taken many beautiful drives down that road and have hiked and explored around the lake.
The lake at night can give out a weird vibe, though.”
“In my hometown there is a legend that one of our high schools is haunted by a girl who committed suicide in the school.
There were reports of green like ooze dripping from the ceiling and the hallway supposedly covered in fog everyday. The hallway has been closed on the fourth floor that has been closed off for decades. Some hear a girl sobbing near the hallway, some see her waving at them from the balcony, even some see a girl jump off of the balcony and see her vanish before she hits the ground.”
“There’s a church in a suburb town of Dallas with no real windows, and if you go there at night, there’s always at least 1 car, sometimes 2 parked in the entrance and really spooky choir music audible. The doors are all metal, and the 10″ish square windows in the doors have that shatter-proof wire mesh in them. Keep in mind that this church is not in a terribly bad area. Not great, but not bad.
Rumor is that a woman walked into a nearby convenience store covered in blood, and said that they tried to sacrifice her. No idea if it’s true, but I used to live near the church, and I can confirm the car(s), spooky music, and overbuilt door bits of the story.
Might actually try to go by there after dark and get a video or something. Anyone interested?”
“Where I am from, there is a man known as the Green Man.
He was a normal person who endured a traumatizing accident in his youth. Basically, a freak accident melted his face clean off, and the the locals called this person ‘Charlie No-Face.’
Eventually he died, but legend has it he still haunts a trail by the railroads, which is where he would do his night time walks, away from people that would be too afraid of him during the day.”
“I used to live near Statesboro Georgia for a time, and while my own home town didn’t have its own creepy urban legend, there was a legend about the old abandoned slaughter house on the aptly named ‘Slaughter house Road.’
The slaughter house had been built sometime originally in the 20’s, and worked through the mid 40’s before a fire ran through the place, killing a number of the employees. The legend was that the fire had been started by the owner when he found out that his young bride to be wanted to break off the marriage in favor of her childhood sweetheart. Among the dead reported were the woman, and the presumed sweetheart. The owner himself effectively vanished off the face of the earth after the fire, making the case technically (he’d be long dead now) still open.
The building has long stood abandoned, with no power, phone, nor access to the very top most floor. Yet this hasn’t prevented phone calls to 911 cropping up from there, as well as strange sightings of a woman walking aimlessly along the top floor where the offices were.”
“The little girl in the white dress.
Apparently a father went crazy in the 1950s and tied up & blindfolded his young daughter that was wearing a white dress. He placed her on train tracks and she was decapitated.
There are sightings to this day of a young girl standing right next to the tracks where the roadway is. They always say that it looks like a real human until she turns around and her eyes are completely black with bloody tears running down her face. Then, poof, she’s gone.
Thats how the sightings always go too. Nobody ever sees her from the front first…it’s always from the back, she turns around, people see the face, are horrified, then they see a mist where the ‘girl’ was and she disappears.”
“From rural Alabama…we had the story of Old Man Taylor. Tl;dr Old Man Taylor’s house caught on fire during a Sunday night poker game, everyone ran out, someone went back in for Taylor, saw his head had been cut off or something like that.
Legend is that the wrong man was convicted, so you can see Old Man Taylor’s eyes watching where his house used to be for the actual killer to come back.”
“Randomly, the amount of suicides in my home town will spike from absolutely zero to about 6 or 7 a year. We can go for 20 or so years without a single suicide, then all of a sudden many people take their lives over the course of 12 months.
I first heard about it when my mother was explaining what happened to some of the people she mentioned by name but I had never met. Two of them happened to take their own lives in the same year, as did 4 other people. They are normally in their early or mid twenties, have pretty normal lives, and usually aren’t connected much in anyway, so it’s not like these are suicide packs.
It’s creepy as hell because this is a small rural town in the highlands of Scotland. The population never really goes over 1,500 people. Most of these people also took their lives in a local forest by hanging themselves.”
“I live in Princeton right now but I’m from a suburb of Seattle but I always say I’m from Seattle because people don’t know where federal way/Tacoma/auburn/Renton is.
So the story goes that if you go Federal Way, on foot or bike at night, and then to Tacoma (doesn’t matter exactly where) you’ll began to notice little things start to get weird. Usually you’ll feel as if you’re just stuck in the same 500ft stretch of land that just repeats over and over again forever. Then paranoia and the last thing would be some things chasing you on foot, shadow figures.
I thought it was stupid when I heard it in the 7th grade until I tried it, except in a car years later. I noticed a few shadowy figures out of the corner of my eye looking at me, at that point I peeled out and drove to my girlfriends in downtown Seattle and said some bullshit about wanting to see her.
Would never try it again. I had an intense paranoia that I couldn’t get rid of. Like night terrors that I felt for days at a time.”
“I live in Southern California, and about half an hour east of the cities in the foothills. It’s very rural with lots of steep rocky hills and dry brush.
The blue people are a cult that live in the deep foothills. They never come out during the day, so their skin is super pale and tinted blue. They will leave a person laying on the rd out in the rural areas, and when a car stops to help them, they’ll surround the car and the person and the vehicle are never seen again.
I once got lost with very little gas out in the foothills at night and this story freaked me out so much I had to keep convincing myself it was just a story.”
Wait… the BLUE PEOPLE?!? What in the actual f**k?
Okay, I’m not sleeping tonight. Thanks Reddit!!!
Which of these really freaked you out? Let us know in the comments!
The post Creepy Urban Legends You Should Read With the Lights On appeared first on UberFacts.
In 1942 there was a man called “the phantom barber”, who would sneak into people’s homes in Mississippi at night and cut their hair
The “lucky cigarette” tradition of flipping a cigarette upside-down and saving it until the end of the pack originated from the myth that 1 cigarette in every Lucky Strike pack contained marijuana.
Aka Manto is a malicious spirit from Japanese urban legends that kills people in public bathrooms. In one version, it first asks its victims to choose between red and blue toilet paper: if they pick red, the victim is sliced to pieces, if they pick blue, they’re choked to death.
Bloody Mary is more than a character. She’s a Halloween (or anytime) tradition amongst young people. You dare each other and egg your friends on until one of you is brave enough to hit the lights, stand in front of a mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” 13 times…
Photo Credit: iStock
Then you wait for the inevitable: for the spirit of the Bloody Mary to appear out of nowhere, kill you and your friends, and ruin your sleepover!
Okay, the murder part doesn’t actually happen, but you know you thought it might when you were a kid (as did I). The ritual is so impactful that different versions of the legend exist across the globe — sometimes centered around a woman named Mary Worth, sometimes involving the devil himself appearing.
It turns out that seeing things in the mirror really isn’t that strange after all. The longer you stare in the mirror, the more likely you are to see stuff that isn’t really there. This phenomenon can be blamed, in part, on what’s known as the Troxler effect. If you stare at the same object for a long time, your brain gets used to the image and the unchanging stimuli. What happens next is pretty incredible: your neurons cancel the information out, and whatever you’re staring at can start to appear blurry or distorted. Until you blink and look around, you’ll continue to see these unusual visions.
Photo Credit: Deviant Art,Skyberry-13
What’s more, if you stare into your own eyes in a mirror long enough, your face will begin to change shape.
Here’s a test for you. Stare at the plus sign in the center of the image below for 8 seconds.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Your brain probably tricked you and distorted your vision in a number of ways, possibly by making the colors in the image fade to gray. Live Science points out that this is actually a coping mechanism. “If you couldn’t ignore the steady hum of your computer monitor, the constant smell of your own body odor or the nose jutting out in front of your face, you’d never be able to focus on the important things — like whether your boss is standing right behind you,” the article explains.
The “strange face in the mirror” phenomenon, like Bloody Mary, is part of this as well. A 2010 experiment conducted by an Italian psychologist had people stare into a mirror for 10 minutes. 66% of the subjects reported seeing “huge deformations” of their face, and 48 % saw “fantastical and monstrous beings.”
Photo Credit: Unsplash,Taylor Smith
So maybe this is why so many people claim to have seen Bloody Mary in the mirror, and why the legend continues to frighten kids to this day. However, while origin of Bloody Mary is debated, but some believe it dates back to a real person — Queen Mary I from the 16th century, who was called Bloody Mary by her protestant enemies.
Others think the legend may be based on a different real person named Mary because varying legends give different versions of her name (Mary Worth, Mary Worthington, Mary Lou). Either way, one thing is for sure — kids will continue to play this spooky game forever, so let’s just hope Bloody Mary doesn’t get angry enough to come bursting through the mirror.
The post The Story Behind Bloody Mary and Why We Think We See Stuff in Mirrors appeared first on UberFacts.
Urban legends are the spooky stories we pass down from generation to generation. You may not know where they started, but you’ve probably known at least one for as long as you can remember They’re a fun way to terrify your younger siblings at just the right moment…especially since we know they’re not true.
It turns out, though, that most stories come from something, not nothing – and these 7 urban legends have roots in reality.
Image Credit: Pixabay
If you’ve gone on vacation (or talked about going on vacation as a child) someone has surely told you to make sure to check under the bed – because if there’s a nasty smell in your room, it’s probably the dead person stashed there. Most of us have stayed in many hotel rooms and never encountered any such thing, so it must be made up, right?
Well…at least a dozen newspaper stories over the years have detailed incidences of this happening to unsuspecting guests, and at least one couple spent the night sleeping over a dead person. In 2010, a Memphis man named Sony Millbrook was discovered dead under a hotel room bed after not one, but four occupants had rented and slept in the room.
So…you know. Maybe check.
The 1992 film Candyman was based on a short story by Clive Barker and details the horrific tale of revenge exacted by a black artist who was murdered in the late 19th century for having an affair with a white woman.
You might not really be able to summon him by saying his name into a mirror, but the story is rooted-ish in fact. The Chicago Reader published an account in 1987 of a woman named Ruth McCoy, who made a 911 call to report that she was being attacked in her apartment. She was found dead from gunshot wounds and it was found that the intruders had accessed her unit by breaking through the connecting wall and climbing through her medicine cabinet.
It was a frequent mode of entry for ne’r do wells at the time, so keep that in mind the next time you think you’re brave enough to stare your mirror down in the night.
Image Credit: Pixabay
This story found its footing in 1970s Virginia, and told the tale of an escaped mental patient who enjoyed hanging bunnies from under a bridge until one day, he graduated to hanging teens in the same manner and never looked back. Local kids wouldn’t dare be caught anywhere near “Bunny Man Bridge” on Halloween night.
The legend, it turns out, probably comes from a real madman who roamed the area around the same time. In late 1970, a couple reported seeing a man in a white suit and bunny ears who yelled at them incoherently before chucking a hatchet at their windshield.
There’s no proof he ever dismembered anything, bunny or teen, but there’s no proof that he didn’t, either…
Image Credit: Pixabay
If you’re into vintage video games (or have been alive long enough to have played “vintage” games during their first run), then you’ve probably heard of Polybius – an arcade game that was supposed to have had caused strange effects in its players: disorientation, amnesia, addiction, and even suicide. The cabinet was painted entirely black, and it was also rumored that men in suits would come and collect information from the machine before disappearing.
It might sound like the plot of the next season of Stranger Things, but some of it is rooted in fact. Brian Dunning, who hosts the Skeptoid podcast, found that a 12-year-old boy named Brian Mauro became sick during a 28-hour marathon contest in 1981 (I mean…28 hours of any game would do that to me, but okay), and, a few days later, Portland-area arcades were raided by federal agents who seized cabinets that were allegedly being used for gambling. Those stories, along with perhaps a few others, come together to create the legend.
Image Credit: Pixabay
In Pennsylvania, stories spread of a man with no face roaming the streets. In reality, Ray Robinson, born in 1910, had a disfigured face due to an electrical accident at the age of 8. Because people didn’t know how to handle his appearance, he often strolled alone after dark – and often along Route 351 in Beaver County, PA, where the tales originated.
Image Credit: Pixabay
Staten Island is home to a child-dismembering boogeyman in its woods – but Cropsey never really existed, right?
Wrong. In 1987, a man named Andre Rand was convicted of child abduction and may have been connected with a whole rash of disappearances in the 70s.
Image Credit: Pixabay
If you live in Toronto, at some point you’ve heard the tale of a lawyer who enjoyed running into his office windows to demonstrate their strength, a practice that one day ended in his death when the window didn’t bear up.
It’s actually totally true – his name was Garry Hoy, and he was a senior partner in a Toronto law firm. In 1993, he crashed through the window of his 24th floor office and fell to his death.
Sleep with the light on tonight if you want – I won’t judge you!
The post 6+ Frightening Urban Legends That Ended Up Being True appeared first on UberFacts.
