Below are five paragraphs that have been
categorized as either a legend or a myth. Did you guess which one's were which? Did you know what was the truth or what was
fiction? You don't have to wait any longer. Oh and before I forget - HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
#1. The Legend:
A young man is dropping off groceries at the house of an
eccentric old lady when he notices an old photo that makes the hair on his arms
stand on end. The photo's normal enough--a young boy in his Sunday best--but
something just seems off. He asks the old lady who it is.
The Truth:
While most folks today
are too squeamish to take more than a glance into the casket during a funeral,
in the late 19th through early 20th centuries someone dying meant it was time
to break out the camera for a family photo. The practice was known as memorial
photography.
And, while it all
sounds like the set-up for some terrifying practical joke on the photographer,
there was actually a somewhat reasonable explanation for the practice. The
process used to take pictures back then was expensive enough that it was a once
in a lifetime (er, or shortly after a lifetime) thing for most, and required
people to sit perfectly still for a couple minutes for it to turn out properly.
And if there's one thing dead people are good at its sitting still.
So, the bodies were
dressed and propped up, with their eyes held open. And in case they still
weren't giving off that lively "I'm not a corpse harnessed to a
chair" vibe, some color was added to the faces in the photo. And just look
what they could do with special effects in those days!
Some photographers
also offered to add stink lines, but it never really caught on.
Eventually the
practice of memorial photography went out of style, maybe because
picture-taking became more affordable and didn't have to be reserved for
special occasions such as death. Or, possibly everyone just sat up all at once
and said, "Wait, what the fuck are we doing?"
Read more:
http://www.cracked.com/article_16721_6-more-creepy-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true.html#ixzz2jJ0CGOKl
#2. The Legend:
A sick woman arrives at a hospital and when the nurses
withdraw blood it is so toxic that it begins making everyone around her sick
too. Realizing they're dealing with the human embodiment of the creature from
Alien, the nurses flee for their lives.
The Truth:
On the evening of
February 19th, 1994, Gloria Ramirez was admitted to a California emergency
room, suffering from an advanced form of cancer.
When a nurse drew
Gloria's blood she detected a foul odor, so foul in fact that hospital staff
started gagging and even collapsing around her. Eventually as many as 23 people
were affected. The ER was evacuated and a decontamination unit brought in. So
more like the creature from Alien crossed with a fart, but still.
The case was quickly
written off as mass hysteria, but considering that the worst affected victim
spent two weeks in intensive care suffering from hepatitis, pancreatitis and
avascular necrosis (a condition which literally causes your bones to die) we'd
say either this was some serious damned hysteria or the guy who decided that
got his degree from Dumbass University.
As for Gloria, she
died just 40 minutes after arriving at the hospital. Her autopsy was performed
by men in full hazmat moon suits and, despite one of the most extensive
forensic investigations in history, it's still not known what exactly turned
this woman's blood into toxic sludge. Granted, the experts on the case have
refused to take off their hazmat suits since that day, and have now retreated
to a small island which they have surrounded with barbed wire, but those are
probably just the usual precautions.
A prop at a carnival was discovered not to be made of the usual combination of papier mache and carni spit, but human skin and bone. All the little kiddies at the haunted house had been poking and giggling at a real, mummified dead body.
The Truth:
Apparently the smell wasn’t just coming from
the convict manning the corndog stand. Back in 1976, a camera crew filming an
episode of The Six Million Dollar Man began to set up in the haunted house at
the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, Calif.
As they were moving
aside a "hanging man" prop, they accidentally knocked off its arm and
discovered human bones inside. Bionic, this poor sap wasn’t.
The story gets
stranger. The body was actually that of criminal mastermind Elmer McCurdy, who
was killed in a shootout after robbing a train in 1911. The princely sum old
Elmer got killed for? $46 (and two jugs of whiskey).
McCurdy was embalmed
by the local undertaker, and apparently the guy was so darn pleased with his
work that he propped up the corpse in the funeral home as evidence of his
skills. People were charged 5 cents to see the corpse, which they paid by
dropping a nickel in the cadaver’s mouth. Remember that little bit of history
the next time somebody turns their nose up at you for liking Hostel 2.
Think it can’t get any
stranger? Oh, you naïve fool. After several years of raking in the nickels (how
exactly these coins were retrieved after being dropped into the corpse’s mouth
is something probably best left to the imagination) our enterprising
undertaker’s scheme was ruined when McCurdy's brothers showed up to claim him.
Of course, these guys weren’t his brothers at all, but wily carnival promoters.
From that point on, McCurdy’s mummy went on a morbid mystery tour all around
America, popping up at carnivals all over the country before finally coming to
rest in Long Beach.
McCurdy is now buried in Oklahoma. Because
McCurdy apparently had the most entertaining corpse in history, they prevented
anyone else from taking him on tour by dumping concrete on top of the casket.
No, really.
Read more:
http://www.cracked.com/article_15628_the-5-creepiest-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true.html#ixzz2jIySC7gM
#4. The Legend:
Every day, millions of us put our lives in the hands of
skilled physicians, dentists and white van tattoo artists. Whether we're
getting wisdom teeth removed or our boobs corrected so they're the same size,
we're working under two assumptions: A) The doctor in charge knows what he's
doing and B) There is no way a doctor could be a psychopath who just went
through medical school so he'd have an excuse to mutilate people.
The Truth:
Glen Tucker was a
terrible plastic surgeon. In fact, he was worse than that -- he was
sadistically incompetent and left a trail of mangled patients behind him
wherever he went. Like the man who came to see him with arm spasms and ended up
having his arm amputated. Or the woman who went in for breast implants and
somehow, against all odds and laws of physics, ended up with square breasts,
covered in Frankenstein-like scars.
So Tucker's faults
went far beyond just being a crappy doctor. Take the story of Jan Lehman, who
had nothing more than a broken nose when she came to see Tucker. Midway through
surgery, she WOKE UP to find the "doctor" wheeling her into a
strangely dark and deserted operating room. She then passed out, but awoke
again as Tucker brutally tore tubing from her nose, destroying her stitches.
Later, after filing a complaint against Tucker, Lehman reported seeing him
following her in his car. He wasn't just inept -- he was Cape Fear crazy.
The complaints and
lawsuits mounted, and then one day Tucker tragically drowned in a boating
accident. Except of course he didn't actually drown, and even if he did, it
probably wouldn't have been that tragic. No, he just flew the coop to Florida,
leaving numerous barely stitched together patients in his wake. Years later, a
TV producer tracked Tucker to Florida, and the doctor gave this eerie
statement: "If I get driven too far into a corner, if it got to the point
where life was no longer worth living, then I would not want to go alone."
He didn't. Several
years later, Tucker loaded his .45 and killed his wife, himself and, yes, even
the cat.
Read more:
http://www.cracked.com/article_20126_7-creepy-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true-part-6.html#ixzz2jIyyILxq
#5. The Legend:
Everyone knows the feeling. You're alone in your house when
you get the unmistakable sense that you're being watched. It's like you can
feel another human presence in the house with you, even though you know you
locked the doors and windows. This spooky trick of the mind is probably why so
many of our ghost stories are about someone being inside our house. There's the
call that was coming from inside the house, the killer who hides under your
bed, the guy who wakes up to find a note taped to his forehead or even the
monsters living in our closet. But those fears are irrational, right?
The Truth:
A 57-year-old man
living by himself in Japan began to notice small things amiss in his house --
objects wouldn't be where he'd left them. Food would disappear that he swore he
didn't remember eating. He'd wake up to strange sounds in the middle of the
night, but every time he'd go and check them out, the door would be locked, the
windows tightly shut. Nobody was there.
Was he losing his
mind? Being messed with by a shy poltergeist? To find out, he set up a series
of spy cameras around his house. The next morning, he ran back the footage on
the camera and that's when he saw it. A strange woman crawling out of a
cupboard like it was the TV in The Ring. And if you think that's terrifying,
imagine what happened inside his stomach when, at the end of the video, she
crawled back into the cupboard. The one that was just a couple of feet away
from where he was standing, watching the video.
Presumably in an
effort to maintain bowel control, the man assumed the woman was a burglar who
was only temporarily hiding in the cupboard, and had since left. He called the
police, who pointed out that all the locks on his doors and windows were
undisturbed. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that anybody had broken in
-- in other words (cue dramatic strings) the woman had been in the house all
along.
After a thorough
search, the woman was found nervously huddled in a small cupboard. Apparently
she had sneaked into the house and slept, ate and even took showers there for
an entire year without being detected. Think of all the things you've done in
your most private moments -- the things you thought nobody would ever see. Now
imagine a homeless Japanese woman had been watching it all. Yeah. We'll let
that one sink in for a moment.
Read more:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19503_7-creepy-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true-part-521.html#ixzz2jIzgNt71
No comments:
Post a Comment