"urban legend" news and stories

I was recently told that the average person swallows eight spiders a year while sleeping. Ewwwww.

I tried not to imagine spiders falling from the ceiling directly into my mouth. However, the image stuck in my head. How did I not notice eating these creepy creatures?

As soon as I got to my computer, I Snoped it out (looked it up on Snopes).

Answer: False.

It turns out that this statistic was invented as an absurd example of what people will believe just because it's on the Internet. I guess it worked since by the time it got to me, it was definitely presented as fact.

Have you ever swallowed a bug while you were sleeping? Did you wake up?

In the past week, several news sources have run stories about a group of Hungarian builders that drank dry a barrel of rum, only to find a human body in it. Yesterday, MSNBC ran this correction, stating that the story they originally ran, based on a Reuters story, was untrue. Apparently, once the story began to circulate, people recognized it for the urban legend it was. Snopes has several variations on the theme of people (and animals) being pickled in barrels of booze. The current story claimed that the man's body had been stashed in the Jamaican barrel by his wife in an attempt to avoid the cost and paperwork of actually shipping her husband's body home properly.