8 Urban Legends That Happen To Be True (Part 6)

Well, it's that time of year again. Specifically, the time of year where we make you shit your pants with stories that sound like they must have been made up, but are actually 100 percent, terrifyingly true. We've done this five times before, and now here are eight more creepy, scary and/or disgusting urban legends that actually happened...

The Engagement Ring and the Grave

The Legend:

Relationship woes form the basis of many urban legends, such as this tale of a man deciding to break off his engagement in the least tactful way possible -- by burying his fiancé alive. Thankfully for the fiancé, the symbol of her broken relationship would end up saving her from a shallow grave.

The Truth:

Michelina Lewandowska and Marcin Kasprzak had been together for over six years, had a three-year-old son and were engaged to be married. They would have been a lovely couple if Marcin hadn't wanted Michelina dead.

Thankfully Marcin was as bad at murdering as he was at relationships. Michelina would return home to the house she shared with Marcin one day, but instead of a hello kiss, she found herself on the receiving end of two taser shots to the neck. Marcin and a friend bound Michelina with tape, stuffed her in an old television box then stole into the night with her like a couple very sinister furniture movers. Marcin and his friend buried his fiancé alive deep in a secluded part of the woods, then promptly went and withdrew nearly $1000 using her ATM card, because hey, that wouldn't look suspicious at all.

As Marcin raided her bank account, Michelina lay curled in a ball underground. Her arms and legs were bound, and air was running out, but thankfully she had a secret (and very ironic) weapon -- her engagement ring from the man who had just tried to kill her. Michelina used the ring to cut through the tape binding her, and then clawed her way to freedom through the dirt and branches her fiancé had not-so-lovingly buried her under.

Ladies, let this be a lesson -- make sure you get a nice, big, sharp diamond out of him. Especially if he has a television box he just doesn't want to get rid of for some reason.

The Very Unhappy Ending

The Legend:

A woman offers her husband a romantic oil massage, which he of course is only too happy to accept. So, she runs a bath, lights candles and gets to work, but whatever she's rubbing him with smells more like gas than oil. Then she reaches for one of the candles...

The Truth:

There are a lot of urban legends about women luring men into a false sense of security then doing something horrible to them because, well, all dudes are a little afraid that one day the women in our lives are going to tire of our shit and try to murder our asses. Usually that fear is unwarranted -- unless you're married to Shriya Patel, that is.

So, one day, out of nowhere, Shriya offered her husband a hot oil massage in the bath, which really, should have been the guy's first warning something was up. Unfortunately for the husband he took her up on the massage, which ended up being significantly less erotic than I'm sure he was hoping.

Not a recommended massage oil replacement. Especially at today's prices.

See, the "oil" she was covering him with was actually gasoline and just as her husband began to notice the smell, Shriya ignited the gas with one of the "romantic" candles scattered around the tub and fled the room, jamming the bathroom door shut behind her. Oh, and she'd also taken the fire alarm off the wall, and wrapped all the sprinklers with scarves. Clearly, Shriya Patel was not the type to do a job half way.

So there you go guys -- justification for keeping those walls up. No need for thanks.

The Milwaukee Mangler

The Legend:

A quiet man, living a quiet life, in a quiet Florida neighborhood kills his wife and then himself. Turns out his secret past as a plastic surgeon may have been even darker. What do you really know about the people next door?

The Truth:

Glen Tucker was a terrible plastic surgeon. In fact, he was worse than that -- he was careless, incompetent (or perhaps sadistic) and left a trail of mangled patients behind him wherever he went. Like the man who went in with arm spasms and ended up having to have 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.

Adding insult to injury, Dr. Tucker barely plumped Frankenstein's lips and his nose didn't come out any slimmer at all.

Glen's faults went far beyond just being a crappy doctor. Take the story of Jan Lehman, who woke from her anesthetic mid-way through a surgery to correct a broken nose and found Dr. Tucker wheeling her into a strangely dark and deserted operating room. She then passed out, but awoke again later as Dr. Tucker brutally tore tubing from her nose, destroying he stitches. Later, after filing a complaint against Dr. Tucker, Jan reported seeing him following her in his car.

The complaints and lawsuits mounted and then one day Dr. 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 had just flown the coop to Florida, leaving numerous barely stitched together patients in his wake.

Years later, a Milwaukee TV producer would track Glen 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, Dr. Tucker would load his Cold .45 and kill his wife, himself and yes, even the cat. You know that creepy vibe you sometimes get from a seemingly normal neighbor that you usually just brush off? Well sometimes you're right, and that neighbour is actually just really, really fucking creepy.

The Corpse in the Deep End

The Legend:

Public pools are gross. We've all heard stories of people finding various things floating in the pool, but forget used band-aids and dirty diapers, could a dead body go undiscovered in a crowded public pool?

The Truth:

You bet it could. In fact Marie Joseph's body made corpse soup in a busy public pool in Fall River, Massachusetts for over two days before finally being discovered.

Somebody should have noticed that Marie hadn't resurfaced after taking a spin on the pool's waterslide -- she was, after all, with friends and neighbours at a local pool full of people. Hell, city health inspectors visited twice and never noted anything about kids playing Marco Polo around a decomposing body.

How could this happen? Well apparently the pool wasn't particularly hygienic even before they started adding human remains to the mix. The pool's water was so damn cloudy that you couldn't see the bottom, and understandably nobody was diving down to the bottom to see what secrets the murky depths held. So yeah, public pools are gross.

The Best Episode Of Cops Ever

The Legend:

Police arrive on the scene of what they think is going to be a straightforward call, only to discover a man has arranged a death for himself straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, except, you know, more blood soaked and horrible than funny.

The Truth:

There are plenty of stories about the crazy things police have encountered on what were supposed to be routine calls. This one that happened last year in Yorktown, Virginia is crazier than most, and unfortunately absolutely true.

When the cops arrived at what they thought was going to be a run-of-the-mill domestic disturbance, they found the husband sitting at a nearby intersection in his car. The car had a trailer attached to it. The trailer was on fire. Police and firemen tried to convince the man to leave his car as calmly as they could -- that is until they noticed the cable tied around his neck, at which point calm reasoning went right out the window.

The other end of the cable was attached to a nearby tree, and as police tried to remove him from the car, the husband hit the gas and well, the cops ended up having to book his head and body separately. Just a tip bad boys -- this is not the thing to do when they come for you.

The Poison Eye Drops

The Legend:

The "be nice to your spouse or they just might kill you" theme continues. A wife, tired of being ignored, decides to get her significant other's attention by poisoning him slowly with something most of us have in the medicine cabinet -- a bottle of eye drops.

The Truth:

Many of you may have heard legend of the "Visine prank". Basically it involves tricking someone you don't like into swallowing eye drops and laughing as their digestive system self-destructs. Well, it actually works. Despite most eye drops being marketed as "natural tears" or somesuch, they're basically super Ex-lax when ingested. But hey, don't worry about dousing your eyeballs with them several times daily!

Well, sure -- everyone's "natural tears" contain hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, right?

Vickie Mills was definitely fully aware of the poisonous properties of eye drops. Upset that her live-in boyfriend Thurman Nesbitt wasn't paying attention to her, she decided the best way to mend their relationship was to slowly annihilate his insides. Vickie snuck eye drops into Thurman's drinking water numerous times over a span of years, causing him near constant nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and blood pressure and breathing problems. Apparently at no time during this protracted poisoning campaign did Vickie ever consider other methods of getting her boyfriend's attention, like say, whipping her boobs out, smacking him upside the head, or you know, anything fucking else. God.

The Real-Life Weekend At Bernie's

The Legend:

Two guys have a madcap adventure with a third guy that's actually dead. It's an acceptable premise for a mildly amusing movie, but it couldn't actually happen in real life, could it?

The Truth:

It could, and even weirder, the guys dragging around the corpse claim they had no idea their friend was dead.

Robert Young and Mark Rubinson arrived at their friend Jeffrey Jarrett's house to find him dead of an accidental overdose, except according to Robert and Mark, they thought he was just drunk. Sure, why not? Lack of breathing and rigor mortis are common side effects of being drunk, right?

These guys couldn't tell whether someone was alive or dead? Nooo, get out. 

So, Robert and Mark (who maybe, just maybe, had had a few drinks themselves) loaded Jeffrey into their car for a night of fun. Jeffrey didn't seem much interested in fun, but surely he'd sober up soon, so Robert and Mark left him to decompose in the back seat while they hit several local watering holes and strip clubs -- all on Jeffrey's tab of course.

But thankfully in the end some mob guy took the fall and Robert and Mark lived happily ever after, even reuniting for a sequel! Oh no, wait, confusing this story with Weekend At Bernie's again. Actually they were charged with identity theft, criminal impersonation and abusing a corpse. Hilarious!

The Collector

The Legend:

A man living in a nondescript apartment is found to have a large collection of human-sized dolls. That would fairly off-putting on its own, but the story gets much worse -- beneath the frilly dresses and blonde wigs, police discover mummified human bodies.

The Truth:

Bodies had been going missing from local cemeteries around Nizhny Novgorod, a large city around 250 miles east of Moscow. The trail eventually led to the cramped apartment of local historian Anatoly Moskvin. What they found was beyond belief.

Okay, now where did he get the kids clothes to dress them in?

Turns out Anatoly was a collector, with an obsession so icky even TLC wouldn't do a show about it. Anatoly collected human corpses, which he dressed in women's clothing and wigs and posed around his apartment. Oh, and their faces were all covered and eerily featureless -- likely as a method of preservation. Or maybe crazy Russian grave robbers just find faceless women hot. Who knows?

You don't need to see this one's face to know it's staring right at you.

The collection wasn't just remarkable for its grossness, but also its scope -- Russian police found a whopping 29 human dolls packed into Anatoly's apartment. So guys, next time your girlfriend or parents start complaining about your collection of vintage action figures, or sexy anime girl statues, just remind them that it could be worse. In Russia, the collector collects you.

When not making jokes at the expense of the worst humanity has to offer, Nathan Birch sometimes writes and draws the funny animal comic Zoology. He also likes new Twitter followers.

7 Creepy Urban Legends That Happen to be True (Part 5)

Halloween's nearly here, and that means Cracked is once again out to prove the tales that scared you shitless as a kid could actually kill you as an adult. As we've shown four times before, sometimes those stories that happened to a friend of a friend can actually happen to you.

The Killer Phone Call

The Legend:

Your mother always told you not to answer the phone in a thunderstorm. Lightning could travel through phone lines and fry your brain she said. Of course the whole "stay away from the phone in a thunderstorm!" thing is just a bit of techno-phobia perpetrated by old people who still haven't figured out how to program the clock on their VCR, right?

The Truth:

Tell that to the parents of 17-year-old Jason Findley who found their son laying in bed with the phone to his ear -- not exactly an unusual position to find a teenager in, but this time something was different. This time, Jason's heart wasn't beating. Lightning had caused an electrical surge to shoot through the phone and into Jason's ear, stopping his heart cold. On the upside, by going all the way and dying from the electric shock Jason at least spared himself one hell of an "I TOLD YOU SO!" from his mom.

"But my phone doesn't have any antiquated wires attached to it" you say, "I only use my cell phone! I'm safe, right?"

Think again. It turns out talking on a cell phone during a storm can increase the severity and deadliness of lightning strikes. So in other words, if you're in the middle of a storm just turn off the cell phone -- you don't want the last thing you hear in life to be a telemarketer trying to sell you a new long-distance plan.

No, I'm not interested in switching to A T and ARRRARARRGH!

The Monk's Mysterious Luggage

The Legend:

It always seems like certain people get through airport security with far less hassle than others. Sometimes you can't help but wonder, what if the kind of person least likely to arouse suspicion (like say, an elderly man who works for the church) was actually carrying a terrible secret in their suitcase?

The Truth:

When the security crew at the Athens airport began a routine check of a seemingly harmless Greek Orthodox monk they had no idea they were about find themselves deep in the middle of some serious Dan Brown shit. See, in addition to regular monk-essentials (bible, spare robes, head polish) this monk had decided to fill his luggage with bones. Human bones.

But thankfully no fluid containers over 3 oz.

The monk had an excuse though -- according to him the bones belonged to a saint, and he was simply transporting the treasure to another monastery. Now, maybe it's just us, but stuffing a saint in your carry-on seems a bit disrespectful, but hey, at least he didn't just wrap the bones in bubble wrap and drop them in a mailbox.

Of course it turned the bones didn't belong to a saint at all, but instead to a nun who had disappeared from her convent four years earlier. How she died and what the monk was planning to do with the bones remains unclear, but police think he may have been planning to pass the bones off as a fake religious relic which he would charge people to see and touch. So in other words, if the nosy security guards at Athens airport hadn't foiled his scheme, Scooby Doo probably would have.

Suuuure, she's totally a saint. 10 bucks to touch her, 20 for a commemorative photo, 100 and you get 20 minutes alone with the bones, no questions asked.

The Revenge of the Killer Chicken

The Legend:

There are plenty of stories circulating that involve animals taking bloody revenge on their cruel masters. It's easy to see why these stories are effective -- it's satisfying to hear about animal abusers (a group almost everyone can agree have it coming) getting their comeuppance, but at the same time, there's something about these tales that hits home. Could your cat be planning an uprising over your decision to start buying the cheap kibble? What about that shock collar you bought Rover? Could you be the next victim of deadly pet vengeance?

The Truth:

That's the question Jose Luis Ochoa should have been asking himself on his last day alive.

Actually, there are a lot of questions Jose should have been posing to himself about his path in life. He had already been arrested for staging cock-fights in the past, and these were no honorable tests of chicken fighting mettle-- oh no, Jose would attach razor blades to his to cock to make sure the fight was as gory as possible.

Hopefully this article is now the #1 Google result for the term "attach razor blades to his cock".

Those razor blades would prove to be Jose's undoing on a fateful late-January day when police stormed one of his fights. During the melee one of Jose's chickens saw it's opening and took it, slicing through an artery in his leg and leaving his heartless owner to bleed to death near the ring where so many of his feathery brethren had been sent to die.

Forget bird flu, chickens will cut you.

The Burglary Gone Bad

The Legend:

During renovations of an old building, workers find something far more disturbing than the usual asbestos insulation and black mold -- the body of somebody who tried to break into the building, but never left alive.

The Truth:

It was the summer of 1984, and Joseph Schexnider was a wanted man on the run from the law. Perhaps he thought he needed money to start a new life, perhaps he was just looking for some place to hide -- we may never know exactly why Joseph decided to crawl down the chimney of the local bank in his hometown of Abbeville, Louisiana, but we do know it was a pretty terrible idea. Those who read last year's urban legends article know crawling down a chimney is a short route to a horrible death, and sure enough the bank's chimney soon became a vertical casket, suffocating Joseph to death.

Just stay out of these things guys.

There's an extra layer of weird to this one though -- unlike the chimney death we already told you about, Joseph wasn't immediately found once he started to stink up the joint. In fact, he continued to hang wedged in the bank's chimney for 27-years, his flesh slowly rotting from his bones as his friends and fellow townspeople did their banking below. So yeah, add "your neighbour who went missing may be decomposing somewhere in the building" to the list of reasons why you hate going to the bank.

The Girl in the Closet

The Legend:

You start to notice small things amiss in your house -- things disappear, objects move, noises are heard.

"Probably just a rodent that crawled in here somehow" you assure yourself, but you know deep down that's not the answer. You can feel another human presence in the house with you, but couldn't be possible. Or could it?

The Truth:

A 57-year-old Japanese man began to notice food disappearing from his kitchen and decided to set up a series of cameras in hopes of catching the culprit. Shockingly, what he caught on camera wasn't the hungry rat or racoon he was expecting, but a strange woman. Assuming she was a burglar, the man called the police, but when they arrived to search the house, they found the door was locked and all the 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 -- and here you thought a jumping spider was the worst thing you could find in the back of a dusty old cupboard.

Hey, sorry about drinking all the milk.

Apparently the woman had snuck into the house and slept, ate and even took showers there for a 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.

The Worst Possible Place to Wake Up

The Legend:

The mourners pass by the casket giving their last respects. It's your turn, and as you look down into the coffin you think, "wow, they did a great job, she almost looks like she's still alive!"

That's when the corpse starts screaming.

The Truth:

It all started when Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, a woman from the northern Russian city of Kazan, suffered a heart attack, and was rushed to the hospital by her husband. At the hospital she was declared dead by a crack team of physicians, who we suspect may have actually been on crack at the time, because it turns out she wasn't dead at all.

If Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov appears to be alive to you in this picture, you're probably not a Russian doctor.

The didn't stop the woman's family from quickly putting together a funeral for her -- a funeral she rudely interrupted with her screams of terror when she awoke and realized where she was. But hey, while having the body at a funeral sit up and start wailing like a banshee is a bit freaky, in the end your loved one isn't dead after all! That's good news, right?

Arrgh! Jesus! Wait a minute...hooray!

Right! Except in this case Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov promptly died again. For real this time.

The shock of waking up at her own funeral was simply too much for the poor woman and she suffered a second heart attack that totally, 100% for-sure killer her for good. At least according to the excellent medical staff that declared her dead the first time. Apparently in Russia the safety coffin is still considered an in-demand technology.

The Baby in Peril

The Legend:

There are tons of terrifying tales out there detailing the things that might be menacing your baby as soon as you let it out of your sight for a split second.

In fact, if there are any new parents out there, go ahead check on the kid. Are you back? There wasn't anything hunched over the crib trying to devour the baby? Okay good, glad you're feeling reassured, because you're not going to be able to enjoy that feeling again for a while after reading this.

The Truth:

A woman (who police have declined to name) left her 3-year old son to play while she cleaned up the house. This mundane slice of everyday life was interrupted when she noticed her boy playing with something behind the couch, and soon discovered he had found a new playmate -- one that happened to be a 6-foot long alligator. Thankfully the boy wasn't hurt, but anyone who's been reading these urban legends articles for a while knows we can't finish this entry on a happy ending.

"There might be alligators in your house, but they probably won't devour your children...at least not immediately" qualifies as a happy ending, right?

With that in mind, we take you to South Africa where according to reports babies are being eaten by giant rats the size of cats. We'll repeat that -- babies are being eaten by giant rats the size of cats.

What...the...hell.

Not only are rats attacking toddlers, but apparently they have a particular taste for the eyes of their victims. Oh, and just because they're freakishly huge doesn't mean they're not sneaky, as they've been able to kill kids while their parents slept only a few feet away.

Hey, want to check on the baby again?

Nathan Birch also works for IGN, creates his own frightfully cute webcomic Zoology and can always use a few extra Twitter followers.

7 Creepy Urban Legends That Happen to be True (Part 4!)

Once again, it's that time of year when Cracked goes out it's way to prove that friend-of-a-friend of yours isn't as full of bullshit as you always assumed. As we've shown three times before, sometimes the real world and the stories we told around a flashlight as a kid aren't as far apart as we might've hoped.

The Organ Thieves

The Legend:

We've all got them -- emails warning travellers that in certain corners of the world people are being abducted or drugged, only to wake up with a ragged scar where one of their kidneys used to be. These kind of stories sound like good fodder for an Eli Roth movie, but they couldn't possibly be true, could they?

The Truth:

Tell that to Indian construction worker Mohammad Saleem, who thought he had just lucked into a new higher paying job (which in India means he would be getting an extra dollar a day). Saleem was instructed to travel to a nearby city and wait in specific bungalow for further instruction, but unfortunately for Saleem the new employers he was waiting for never showed up. Who did show up were several men in masks who broke into the house and forcibly drugged Saleem. Suddenly that extra dollar a day seemed like it may not be worth it.

Job applicants should be enthusiastic, self-starters who aren't particularly attached to their internal organs.

Saleem would wake up sometime later on a cold metal gurney, with a shooting pain in his side. His kidney was gone, and his abductors told him in no uncertain terms that if he told anyone he'd be losing a lot more than a kidney. Saleem wasn't the only victim either -- police would later uncover a blood-soaked reverse Robin Hood scheme in which a band of men posed as doctors and stole numerous organs from the poor to sell to the rich.

Getcha' kidney! Getcha' kidney here! Tub-full-of-ice fresh kidneys!

This was hardly an isolated incident. The illegal organ trade is worth big money and from India, to South Africa, to Brazil to Eastern Europe there's plenty of folks out there willing to do anything to get their hands on new market fresh organs -- even if the people who own them aren't quite done using them yet. So yes, sometimes spam email isn't completely full of shit -- don't get your hopes up about getting the five grand you sent to that Nigerian Prince back though.

The Corpse in the Chimney

The Legend:

A person goes missing and their loved ones look high and low for them, but the search proves fruitless -- that is until a telltale smell begins to waft out of the fireplace. The family peer up the dark chimney, and well, they sure as hell don't find Santa Claus up there.

The Truth:

It all started when Jacquelyn Kotarac tried to get into the house of her on-again, off-again boyfriend. We're guessing they were "off-again" at the time, because instead of say, using her key to open the front door, she decided it would be a better idea to scramble up on the roof and descend into the house through the chimney. Apparently Jacquelyn didn't watch a lot of Looney Tunes as a kid, or she'd know these types of schemes almost never work out well.

Daffy Duck could tell you this isn't a good idea.

Halfway down the chimney Jacquelyn got stuck, and with her boyfriend away there was nobody to hear her cries for help as she hung wedged in what would ultimately become her soot-caked final resting place. Friends and family immediately began searching for Jacquelyn when she didn't return home, but nothing turned up until the boyfriend's house-sitter showed up to water the plants. Upon entering the house she immediately noticed an overpowering stench, and found the fireplace filling with -- and this is a technical term now -- corpse juice.

Jacquelyn Kotarac at the office. Sadly one of those folders behind her isn't labelled "Reasons You Should Stay the Hell Out of the Chimney".

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this story? Jacquelyn Kotarac was better known around the workplace as Doctor Jacquelyn Kotarac. If this story proves anything, it's this -- 11 years of college isn't going to keep some people from still doing some really, really stupid shit.

The Creepy Sewer Creatures

The Legend:

In addition to the regular disgusting things you can find in a toilet, legend has it sewer rats can crawl up through the pipes into your toilet, ready and waiting to inject rabies straight into your balls. Oh, and what about the most infamous sewer-related myth of all -- have alligators at any time roamed the sewers of New York City?

The Truth:

Late one night Ian went to go use the washroom, and found himself face to face with a furry creature, and it sure as hell wasn't one of those butt-wiping obsessed Charmin bears.

Although they're disturbing in their own way...

It was beady-eyed, sopping wet sewer rat. Ian's first move was what any sensible person would have done -- he tried to flush it. A cleansing flush has removed so many other unwanted things, why not a rat? That shit only made it mad. In the end Ian had to trap the squealing struggling beast between the bowl and the toilet seat and murder the vermin with his own hands like the final "hero finally realizes the horrible thing he must do" scene from a Saw movie. If you're not afraid of catching liberal bias, you can hear the whole story from Ian himself courtesy of NPR here. Turns out Ian's not the only one this has happened to, and plumbers agree it's entirely possible, especially if your toilet is on the ground floor. So next time you're running to the bathroom post Taco Bell visit, make sure the check the bowl first...not even a rat deserves that.

Orrrr maybe they do.

But what about alligators in the New York sewers? While there's debate over whether they exist now (you're more likely to be bit by a homeless person than an alligator down there) there are several credible stories that seem to prove that they roamed the pipes at some point.

Take the story from 1935 of a group of teenagers managing to yank a full eight foot gator out of the sewer, or the tales of sewer superintendent Teddy May who claimed that at one time, gators were downright common in New York sewers. It may sound far-fetched, but we're sure not going to go down there to prove him wrong, are you? We didn't think so.

The Human Grease Vampires

The Legend:

In parts of South America people tell tale of the fearsome Pishtacos, shadowy figures who stalk peasants along dark roads, kill them and drain them of their fat. Stories of these cholesterol-laden vampires are hard to believe -- if Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer are to be believed vampires spend most of their time shirtless, and that's not going to impress anyone with if you spend all your time drinking liquid fat. Could South American human grease thieves actually exist?

The Truth:

When police arrested the gang which operated deep within the jungle highlands of Peru, they made some grisly discoveries -- a pile of human ribs and thighbones, a decomposing human head, and yes, two plastic Coke bottles filled with what appeared to be human fat (which for the record is the second most disgusting thing to be kept in a plastic Coke bottle, after Coke Zero). It seems the gang would confront people along the quiet back roads, lure them to their laboratory, bludgeon them to death, dismember them, and then using candles render the fat out of the body, which they captured in a basin below. But what do you do with a bottle of human pan drippings?

You really don't want to know Outback Steakhouse's secret to frying a blooming onion.

The police at first claimed they were selling the fat to cosmetic companies to be used in anti-aging creams, while the criminals themselves claimed they were selling it to local shamans to use in satanic rituals. The motives of the murderers may never be known for sure, but this much is clear -- the South American version of The Biggest Loser best stay clear of the Peruvian jungle.

The PCP Cannibal

The Legend:

The legend has been floating around for a while that the drug PCP doesn't merely inspire regular garden variety hallucinatory freak-outs, it actually has the ability to turn somebody into a human flesh hungry maniac. Surely this is merely Reefer Madness-esque propaganda though -- something dreamt up by Nancy Reagan in one of her more creative moods?

The Truth:

The story of Antron Singleton, a rapper with the appropriately creepy sounding handle "Big Lurch" says otherwise. In 2002 Big Lurch was found, well, lurching around the streets of Los Angeles in the dead of night, naked, covered in blood and howling at the moon after going on a near week long PCP binge. Of course none of this is overly strange for a rapper -- Snoop Dogg considers drug-fuelled naked moon howling part of a regular Saturday night -- but things got much more sinister once they inspected Antron's apartment.

Rapper Big Lurch in his more innocent pre-human flesh ingesting days.

There they found his roommate brutally slain, with her lungs torn from her torso, and her body and face covered with...bite marks. An examination of Antron's stomach contents found it was full of human flesh, officially eliminating the "uh, I think the dog must have done that" defense. Turns out PCP can be a bit of a gateway drug -- a gateway towards becoming a goddamn zombie that is.

80s anti-drug PSAs needed less frying eggs and more zombies.

Of course we don't want to be alarmists -- we're sure there's plenty of fine upstanding PCP addicts out there. All we're saying is you might want to hit up the Burger King before you go on a PCP bender, as this clearly isn't the drug you want to be doing on an empty stomach.

The Ice Woman

The Legend:

A person is brought into the hospital completely frozen and assumed to be dead. The doctor taps the body with his pen, declares, "Yup, that's dead" and the presumed corpse is taken to the morgue before any kids can accidentally get their tongue stuck to it. But that's not the end of the story -- as the body thaws it begins to stir, and eventually rises to its feet and walks out of the hospital as if nothing happened.

The Truth:

When a neighbour found Jean Hilliard in the snow she was frozen solid. That's not euphemism; she was literally frozen like a turkey in your grandma's deep freeze. Her body was too frozen to pierce with a needle, her temperature too low to register and when they took her to the hospital they loaded her into the car diagonally like a piece of lumber from Home Depot. She was, by nearly every measure, stone cold dead.

When this Jeansicle arrived at the hospital doctors tried to thaw her out, but nobody had much hope for a happy ending -- even if she wasn't dead she'd almost certainly have severe frostbite and brain damage. Or would she? As Jean lay wrapped in an electric heating pad her eyelids began to flutter, and after some time she thawed completely, returning to life as if nothing had happened. She showed absolutely no ill effects from her little nap in the snowbank -- no frostbite, no brain damage, not even any freezer burn. This 19-year old woman from North Dakota had, essentially, come back from the dead completely unharmed. Had she been sipping on antifreeze cocktails earlier in the evening? Did Mr. Freeze secretly give her up for adoption as a baby? Nobody knows for sure, but she certainly has a hell of scare story to tell her future kids if they ever try to go out in the cold without their hats or mitts on.

The Killer in Cop's Clothing

The Legend:

Depending on the story a police officer approaches somebody in public, or knocks on their door, tells them there's a dangerous criminal on the loose in the area, and that it's important that they let them inside or that the person comes with them. The person being an upstanding -- yet not particularly perceptive -- citizen, does what the officer tells them to, but then asks what this criminal looks like.

"Oh," the officer replies "a lot like me actually."

The Truth:

Carol DaRonch was browsing through a Utah city bookstore when she was approached by a police officer who informed her that her car had been broken into in the parking lot and that she should come with him down to the station to file a report. A perfectly reasonable sounding request, except for one rather important fact -- this police officer was, in reality, infamous serial killer Ted Bundy.

We're not sure that haircut is in compliance with police guidelines.

Carol started to suspect something was up when Bundy didn't pick her up in a shiny police issue Crown Victoria, but his shitty VW Bug. Granted she still got in the car, but hey, it was the 70s -- creepy looking guys driving Volkswagens made up 90% of the male population back then.

How did any guy ever get laid in the 70s?

Thankfully Carol finally caught on when Bundy pulled out a gun and a pair of handcuffs, and she managed to kick him in the balls (unfortunately she had left her steel toed boots at home that day), escape the car and flag down another vehicle...which drove her to the police station. After what she'd just been through we suspect she made sure every cop at the station showed her their badge about half a dozen times.

Well, your Federal Breast Inspector's badge looks official...

Bundy was hardly the first, or the last to try this kind of stunt, and unfortunately others have pulled it off with deadlier results. In other words, it may be a good idea to ask a few questions before you blindly do whatever the man tells you to do -- just don't tell the cops that advice came from us as you're laying face down on the pavement with a knee to the back of your head.

As always, Nathan Birch also writes the disgustingly cute webcomic Zoology.