Frightful stories of cryptids, aliens, and urban legends are retold every Halloween. Campfire versions embellish the truth for cheap scares. The origins of these 10 popular tropes prove that sometimes real life is even more bizarre.
Neighbors Poison Halloween Candy
Ronald O’Bryan forever changed Halloween. Cautious parents now inspect their children’s Halloween candy to ensure no prankster has tainted it. They often test it themselves. Only one recorded child has died from poisoned Halloween candy, and it wasn’t a bogeyman, but the child’s own father.
In 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan went trick-or-treating with five friends. They approached a dark house with its lights off. When they rang the doorbell, Ronald O’Bryan emerged from the shadows and handed each kid a restapled 21-inch Pixy Stix coated in cyanide. Deeply in debt, Ronald killed his son to cash in on a life insurance policy. On June 3, 1975, a jury convicted Ronald of one charge of capital murder and four counts of attempted murder.
Following the unsolved Chicago Tylenol poisoning, the threat of children dying no longer seemed like a quirky holiday superstition. Retellings turned the myth of deadly candy into needles in chocolate. It only made sense that only a sadistic monster would feed trick-or-treaters razor blades or hand out poisoned apples.
Piranhas Are Flesh-Eating Monsters
Nature-loving Teddy Roosevelt unknowingly spread this groundless myth. Piranhas’ reputation as pocket-sized demons that devour meat in seconds is unjustified. The fish are omnivorous, and some species are strictly herbivores. They only eat animals bigger than insects or other fish when they are starved, like when President Roosevelt first saw them.
In 1913, Brazilian dignitaries were eager to impress the former President. Desperate to make an impressive spectacle, they closed off a section of the Amazon River. For days, the isolated Piranhas were denied food. In honor of Roosevelt’s arrival, the locals dropped a live cow into the swarm. The school stripped the bovine in seconds, leaving only barren bones floating to the top. Recalling the event in his travelogue, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Roosevelt described the fish as the “embodiment of evil ferocity.” Schlocky b-grade movies like James Cameron’s Piranha II: The Spawning ingrained the misconception in popular culture.
Celebrities Get Their Ribs Removed
On-stage antics are meant to shock. Theatric rocker Marilyn Manson’s legacy has been eclipsed by the rumor that he removed his ribs to perform self-fellatio. The oft-repeated line has no validity. This allegation was as false for the first person to have it applied to them. He unleashed horrors far more appalling than “The Beautiful People.”
Rumors around celebrities removing their ribs is frequently targeted against women looking for unorthodox weight loss. That strain of story still gets retold with various stars like Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Racquel Welch, or Britanny Spears. The salacious wrinkle that someone would opt for the surgery for self-fallacio is attributed to Gabriele D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio trafficked in gossip. To bolster his fame, D’Annunzio spread scandalous tales that he cooked baby flesh, stitched a robe to expose himself, and stole the Mona Lisa. Despite his controversial history, Italy still heralds D’Annunzio as one of their nation’s great poets. The world is more familiar with his other work, fascism.
The first modern fascist state was the city of Fiume, seized by D’annunzio’s 2,000-strong militia. Italian forces tried to reclaim the small town for 15 months. Eventually, the navy compelled surrender. Benito Mussolini admired D’Annunzio’s resolve. After his rise to power, Mussolini modeled himself after D’annuzio. D’annuzio was wary of Il Duce’s legitimacy, but he suggested an easy symbol to identify followers of the cause. Initially known as “The Roman Salute,” the Nazis adopted the hand gesture as the Seig Heil.
The Jersey Devil
Two people birthed the Jersey Devil. Tradition holds that Mother Leeds conceived her thirteenth child in a pact with Satan. The deformed offspring sprouted wings, hooves, and a tail. The second culprit is Benjamin Franklin.
The Leeds family lacks the same name recognition as the Founding Father, but they still shaped history. Daniel Leeds’ Almanac was the earliest printing in the New Jersey colony. Its anti-Quaker stance is among the first political attacks in American history. Quakers retaliated by calling Daniel Leeds, “Satan’s Harbinger.”
Daniel passed almanac responsibilities to his son, Titan. Under his pseudonym “Poor Richard,” Benjamin Franklin joked that astrological calculations prophecized Titan’s imminent death. As the prediction passed in 1733, the very much not dead Leeds called Franklin, “a liar.” Franklin retorted that he was still right. Titan was just a ghost. By the time of Titan’s real 1738 death, anti-British sentiment turned the Leeds family into a symbol of ridicule. Their family crest was mocked as the Leeds Devil. A 20th-century huckster revitalized oral stories of the Leeds Devil into the cryptozoological chimera that terrorizes New Jersey’s forests and, occasionally, the National Hockey League.
Nazi UFO’s
Like any good melodrama, Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s life starts with, “it was a dark and stormy night.” The hackneyed cliché first appeared in Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Other common phrases, like “The almighty dollar” or “The pen is mightier than the sword,” were coined within Bulwer-Lytton’s works. His life was as florid as his writing. In retribution for locking her in an insane asylum under false pretenses, his wife, Rosina Doyle Wheeler, sabotaged Bulwer-Lytton’s Parliamentary campaign. She leaked misinformation that he was having an illicit affair with future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. No story better encapsulates his life than the far-reaching consequences of his 1871 potboiler The Coming Race.
The pulp novel was among the first science fiction texts to use the plot device of a traveler unearthing a mythical land. The main character discovered a secret underground commune inhabited by a race of angels called Vril-ya powered by the fluid “vril”. A fan of the occult, Bulwer-Lytton’s fictional realm referenced common pseudoscientific ideas of the day. In 1947, researcher William Ley inspired real-life quests to tap into Vril’s power. One such organization, the Vril Society, was allegedly founded when psychic Maria Orsic used her telepathic hair to communicate with aliens. Intergalactic beings equipped the Third Reich with superior technology in the waning days of the war. Shockingly, historians are not convinced the society existed.
The absurd idea of aliens working with the Nazi high command permeated pop culture. Tongue-in-cheek video games like Iron sky: Invasion, the Wolfenstein franchise, or the zombie levels of Call of Duty are based on the conspiracy theory. Along with all of their other wrongheaded views, some Neo-Nazis sects still maintain Vril is out there.
Chemirocha
Jimmie Rodgers was a legend in life. Death made him a deity. As “The Father of Country Music,” generations of composers were inspired by Rodger’s pioneering yodel. A fraction of the artists shaped by Rodgers’ catalogue include Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. His influence stretched far beyond the American South, including Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.
British missionaries brought the word of God and the yelps of Rodgers. To further spread their message, evangelists played gramophone copies of country records. The Kipsigis tribe favored Jimmie Rodgers. Through bungled translation, the formative country singer’s name became “Chemirocha.” “Chemirocha” entered the lexicon for anything new or interesting.
In the 1950s, ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey returned to the Kipsigis village to field record local songs. The phrase “Chemirocha” morphed into lore. Because of his unnaturally high-pitched voice, “Chemirocha” was described as a half-man and half-antelope faun. Either in myth or his music, Jimmie Rodgers achieved immortality.
The Loch Ness Monster
Murmurs of some creature lurking within Scotland’s Loch Ness were told for centuries. The modern notion of an aquatic reptile comes from a single 1934 photograph published in The Daily Mail. Dubbed “The Surgeon’s Photo,” the grainy black and white visual of a long neck and humped figure breaking through the water became the standard depiction of the beast. Everyone involved has since admitted it was a hoax.
In 1933, the Inverness Courier printed the first sighting of the legendary animal. The Daily Mail wanted to get in on the craze. They stationed Marmaduke Wetherall to gather evidence. In December 1933, he discovered a set of footprints on the shoreline. Natural History Museum scientists determined they were made by a dried hippo’s foot from an umbrella stand. Mocked for being so gullible, Wetherall concocted his revenge.
Wetherall approached his stepson Christian Spurling to create a fake monster. Molding some clay on top of a toy submarine, Spurling photographed the replica as it drove around the lake. To lend some credibility, the duo employed noted surgeon Colonel Robert Wilson to hand the pictures to The Daily Mail. Marmaduke Wetherell embarrassed the British tabloid just as they embarrassed him.
The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs
1979’s When a Stranger Calls begins with the classic twist of a panicked babysitter realizing that the killer’s call was coming inside the house. The crime that inspired it was an even more tragic irony. The phone cord she thought could save her, killed her.
On March 18, 1950, 13-years-old Janett Christman babysat Ed and Anne Romack’s 3-year-old son, Gregory. Worried about her safety, Ed lent Janett a shotgun if anyone suspicious stopped by. It was never used. Around 10:35 p.m., the local Sheriff’s Department received a frantic phone call. In between disjointed breaths, the dispatcher barely made out a plea for help. Within three hours, Christman was dead. She had been bludgeoned, raped, and strangled with the wires from an electric iron and the telephone. Thankfully, Gregory was unharmed.
Jurisdictional squabbles hampered the investigation because the Romacks lived 100-yards over the city limits. Competing agencies feuded over evidence. This divide allowed the prime suspect, Robert Mueller, to evade justice. Mueller had a lecherous reputation in the community. His occasional babysitter, Mueller lusted after Janett in particular. The stationary shotgun suggests Christman knew the culprit. The night of the murder, Mueller excused himself for two hours to meet his doctor, but the doctor says he never showed up. The morning after the murder, Mueller phoned the Romacks and asked if they needed any assistance cleaning the blood, before the press reported the murder. Taken to a barn outside city limits, police interrogated Mueller, but the questions were inadmissible. Mueller died in 2006, never charged with any crime. Officially, the case remains unsolved.
Grey Aliens Probe Butts
There are two possibilities. Believers contend that on September 9, 1961, husband and wife Barney and Betty Hill were abducted by a flying saucer somewhere along New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Aliens shoved a needle through Betty’s navel and a metallic capsule inside Barney’s rectum. Skeptics maintain it was all made up. Neither view justifies why so many people have shared this delusion.
Logic explains away most of the supposed details. Sleep-deprived, the Hills drove five hours nonstop in the middle of the night. In this foggy state, an observatory tower light weaving along the wooded road could be confused for a craft. The visual of grey-skinned aliens with an enlarged forehead closely resemble the costume design of a beast in an episode of The Outer Limits aired two weeks before Barney shared his account. The intrusive surgery resembles accounts of accidental awareness Barney might have experienced if anesthesia wore off in a recent tonsillectomy. Physical evidence like Betty’s ripped dress, Barney’s scuffed shoes, or circular dents on the car are harder to rationalize, unless this whole story was created by an unscrupulous doctor.
The Hills were reluctant to publish their account. They only came forward at the recommendation of their psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, in 1964. Under hypnosis, the Hills were susceptible for the opportunistic doctor to plant false memories. The couple did not initially seek out counseling over concerns, but Barney’s doctor warned he needed to treat stress-induced high blood pressure and ulcers. His first psychiatrist concluded Barney’s anxiety stemmed from being a black man married to a white woman. Active in the civil rights movement, the stigma of the interracial marriage caused mental unrest. Shortly before their sighting, the waitress at the diner they visited was disgusted by the couple’s race. Black and white together make grey.
Elvis Faked His Death
Jimmy Ellis wanted to be a star, but every record with his name on it flopped. Critics always complained he sounded too much like Elvis Presley. After 15 years of little success, Ellis abandoned music and settled on being himself. Then, Elvis died.
Mercury Records Vice President Shelby Singleton released Ellis singing 1950’s standards under the implication these were lost Elvis’ recordings. By Elvis’ 1977 death, Singleton hatched a fantastical con. Loosely inspired by Elvis’s biography, Gail Brewer-Giorgio’s unpublished novel Orion: The Living Superstar of Song tells of a Southerner who lucked into becoming the world’s most popular singer. After squandering his fame on drugs and vice, Orion faked his death to find peace.
Dressed in bedazzled jumpsuits, jet black hair, and a rhinestone mask, Singleton marketed Ellis as Orion. Local publications ran that Orion actually was Elvis reincarnated. Singleton fostered such theories by coyly rerecording old Jerry Lee Lewis albums as duets with Orion. Eleven Orion albums were released between 1978 and 1982, including nine charting country singles.
Despite his burgeoning success, Ellis hated his fabricated identity. He grew convinced he was Vernon Presley’s illegitimate child. Sharing the same biological father might explain Ellis’ uncanny similarities. On New Year’s Eve 1983, Ellis tore off the Orion mask. He renounced his alter ego to manage a pawn shop in Alabama. In 1998, he was killed. He was 53.
From poisoned sweets and killer babysitters to alien probes and faked deaths, the line between spooky tales and reality is often blurred. These stories reveal how real events can be twisted and embellished into the legends that haunt our imaginations.
Which of these spooky tales surprised you the most? Leave your comment below!
