Real-life Snopes stories

On the internet, all sorts of crazy stories circulate. It's pretty easy to check Snopes.com and say, "Yeah, that didn't happen."

But on occasion, I've heard these stories repeated in real life, not on the internet (although in many cases I'm sure they originated there). So here are some I've heard in real life, and not just on the internet.

On Easter in 2010, I was at my aunt's house, and she was telling us how my cousin April shared an experience that supposedly happened to her friend. Her friend's son had Down syndrome or something, and one day he called his mom frantic at work and said, "Mom, everything's OK, but you need to come home right now. I've got a troll locked in the closet." Well, the mom went home, and it wasn't a troll, of course, but a midget Jehovah's Witness. They had knocked on the door and the boy took the small person and trapped him. My aunt said that the JWs weren't mad about the situation. Later, I talked to my mom about the story, and she had heard it too, and said that the JWs were actually mad and wanted to sue. These contradictions aren't the only red flag to this story. I think it would be pretty hard for an intellectually disabled person to wrangle someone into a closet, especially if a full-statured person was accompanying the small person. Lo and behold, it's on Snopes.

In winter 2012, I had a semantics and pragmatics class in which our professor told a story that allegedly happened to a past general authority who had held a prominent position in a California city. They were hosting a dinner with a lot of important people and had some expensive salmon flown in. While they were making preparations for dinner, they found their cat on the table, eating the salmon. Well, it wouldn't do to serve the cat-eaten portion, so they put the cat outside and cut out the part of the fish it had been eating. The guests came and left, and then the hosts went outside and found their cat dead. Worrying it must be the salmon, they called someone about it, and they said they couldn't take chances, that the salmon might be poisonous. They had to call all of their guests and tell them they needed to have their stomachs pumped because their cat had eaten the salmon and died. It was obviously a painfully humiliating experience. The next day, their neighbor told them that he had run over their cat (which is how it died), but he didn't want to interrupt their important dinner party to tell them that. He then said that that story had been incorporated into a movie. I really wanted this one to be true, since I heard it from a professor who seemed he would do more fact checking, but it's on Snopes as well.

On December 20 last year, I went to a game night where a girl told a story that happened to a friend, or maybe a friend of a friend. She had filled up her gas tank, and an attendant in the store called on a loudspeaker to her that her card didn't work and she needed to come inside to pay. When she got inside, she learned that the attendant called her inside because someone had gotten in her car and was lurking in her backseat. The girl telling this story provided it as a warning to everyone. Then someone else said they heard that if someone drives without headlights, you shouldn't flash your lights at them, because it's part of a gang initiation--the new gang member has to attack whoever flashes their lights. I said, "That's sounds like a story you'd read on Snopes.com." I went home and looked at both of them, and they both were there. In fact, the gas station story had been quoted almost verbatim.

I'm sure there have been other times, but these are all I can remember now.