David Emery's Urban Legends Blog

My theory is that with so many ordinary citizens now having the means (and meanness) to launch homespun political smear campaigns via the Internet, paid political operatives will soon become ... Read More

We welcome — in fact, we depend on — your submissions of suspected urban legends, email rumors and Net hoaxes, even if you're not sure they qualify as folklore. For ... Read More

It's true. One day a year Ben & Jerry's scoop shops give away ice cream cones, and this year's Free Cone Day is Tuesday, April 29. Lately I've been receiving ... Read More

With gasoline prices continually rising, some folks are resorting to the money-saving tips they find in forwarded emails -- not always the most reliable of information sources, to say the ... Read More

Choose the most correct answer for each question. Remember, all the questions pertain to urban legends, so a correct answer isn't necessarily a true one. Good luck! Question #1: According to ... Read More

420 is not the number of a bill in Congress to legalize pot, though many people believe it is. 420 is not the police or penal code for marijuana possession in ... Read More

The story continues. Via Museum of Hoaxes, we learn that Yale art student Aliza Shvarts is contradicting a Yale spokesperson's claim that the student's senior project involving serial pregnancies and ... Read More

"There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression," presidential candidate Barack Obama has supposedly stated. "And the anthem itself ... Read More

Yale art student Aliza Shvarts delivered a one-two punch to the media on Thursday, beginning with the announcement of her senior project: an exhibition chronicling a nine-month period during which ... Read More

(Updated) A fake Amber Alert claiming that two young girls were kidnapped by a suspect driving a brown Jeep Liberty spread across at least ten states via text message this ... Read More

Online petitions are calling for the exclusion of Costa Rican artist Guillermo "Habucuc" Vargas from the upcoming Central American Biennial exhibition because he allegedly orchestrated an event last year in ... Read More

True. According to the Chicago Tribune, police shot and killed a 150-pound cougar in an alley in the Chicago neighborhood of Roscoe Village Monday night. The shooting capped two weeks ... Read More

Bath, England (5 days ago): A British family got more than they bargained for when they opened a bag of prepackaged spinach and out jumped a tiny green tree frog. ... Read More

In case you were wondering, FreeRice.com is neither a hoax nor a scam, despite its seemingly too-good-to-be-true premise. Visitors to the nonprofit website are presented with a word definition challenge, ... Read More

After 15 minutes of jackhammering at an estimated cost of $50,000, construction workers excised a Red Sox jersey buried in the foundation of the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx ... Read More

Question #1: How many spiders does the average person swallow in their sleep per year?  • One  • Four  • Seven  • Eight  • Nobody knows

Is it a naked woman? A space alien? Some gangly dude smoking a cigar? Or is it nothing more mysterious than the vice-president's arm holding a fishing pole? The ... Read More

A department store in London is offering kopi luwak -- the legendary varietal coffee consisting of beans harvested from the dung of the palm civet in Indonesia and southeast Asia ... Read More

Word has it that a baby born with two faces in northern India last month is being worshipped by local villagers as the reincarnation of the Hindu demon-fighting goddess Durga. ... Read More

Not that there is a prayer of it ending more than a decade of speculation concerning the circumstances of Princess Diana's death, but the coroner's inquest jury returned a verdict ... Read More

Dog bites man, not news. Man bites dog, news. Woman bites dog, it's a trend! Please note, I'm not necessarily questioning the veracity of the stories below. I just find it ... Read More

Remember that Frosted Flake shaped like the state of Illinois that sold on eBay last month? Here's your chance to meet the man who forked over 1,350 U.S. dollars for ... Read More

Folks are asking if there's any truth to the CNN report that rapper Snoop Dogg has converted to Mormonism. The answer is no. If you check the date of the ... Read More

Buck Wolf informs us that the old chestnut about Mountain Dew preventing pregnancy is still very much with us in the enlightened 21st century. Some teens surveyed in Florida admitted ... Read More

Two legendary-but-real canine specimens made the news in recent weeks, one living and one dead, both having achieved their 15 minutes of doggy fame by winning notice in the Guinness ... Read More

"The very word 'dragon' is related to other ancient words having to do with vision," writes our maestro of mythology Peter Kohler, "such as the Sanskrit darc, to see, the ... Read More

No one knows exactly how or when April Fools' Day originated, but it may have had something to do with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the mid-1600s, which ... Read More