So, think you know the difference between fact and fiction? Take the Urban Legends quiz and find out. Read the following scenarios and keep track of which ones you believe and which ones clearly didn't happen. Then check our answer key to find out where you stand...
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1. A roadside dealer of fresh fruit sold a bag of pitted peaches to a hungry traveler. Upon biting into the third peach, the traveler felt his tooth crack on a hard object. The object turned out to be a diamond worth over $5000. Unfortunately, the traveler's dental bill turned out to be $10,000, for which he sued the fruit vendor -- to no avail, of course, as fruit vendors tend to have rather slim bank accounts.
2. A history professor at a midwestern university grew suspicious that his undergraduates were buying essays from graduate students, so he decided to play a little joke. Using a trusted upper-level history major as a front, he wrote and sold essays to his own students. Instead of writing topical essays, the professor slapped academic-sounding titles on nonsensical tracts covering subjects from "My life as a Railway Engineer" to "Why Stalin was Probably a Really Big Fan of the Australian Rugby Team." During the next testing period, no fewer than sixteen students turned in the tainted works, prompting a mass expulsion.
3. There was once a railway company director who could only achieve full sexual satisfaction by watching a train derail. In order to feed his monstrous urge, he took to dynamiting the rails, sending the passengers careening to their deaths. After his arrest and release, the Soviet government employed him as an explosives expert.
4. A senile old man left his two sons a will wherein he claimed to have hidden a considerable stash of money in a safe underneath his home. Instead of concerting their efforts, the brothers fought over who should claim the treasure; the dispute ended with one brother knocking the other unconscious with a shovel and tying him to a chair. The brother then started digging under the house, eventually rupturing a septic tank, which flooded and ruined the kitchen and living room. It turned out that the father's ex-wife had a claim to the house after his death, and he wanted to diminish its value before she took possession.
5. A police investigator, burnt out by long hours and a gruesome work load, had a nervous breakdown and committed himself to a sanitarium. Because the place was cold and damp, he took to sleeping in his socks, which were often inexplicably wet when he awoke. His former colleagues called for his services in an unsolved murder case. The detective noted that the footprints left near the body, like his own foot, were missing a toe. He placed his own foot in the print, and to his surprise discovered that he had sleepwalked out of the sanitarium and killed the man himself.
6. A small-town Wisconsin man with a macabre loathing for his mother took to digging up bodies and dancing around his room in their skin, which he'd fashioned into women's clothing. Still unsated, he began murdering local townsfolk and mounting their heads like deer in his living room.
7. A moonshine distillery in Virginia was broken up in a strange and horrifying way when several dogs got into the stash. The dogs, bred by the distiller to defend the secret location, viciously turned on their owner, who had to hide in his car until morning while the rabid beasts snapped at the windows. Coincidentally, the murder rate in the cities served by the moonshiner's whiskey (exported in huge quantities by truck all over the Eastern Seaboard) jumped 15% over the next two weeks.
8. A film buff discovered that his love of the silver screen had turned him into a murderous fiend when he "awoke" to find his hands wrapped around his neighbor's neck. Apparently, the rate of flicker in the film triggered a sort of epileptic seizure in the man, who would then give into an uncontrollable urge to kill.
9. A computer virus wiped out the files of a large offshore investment firm. The virus took the form of what looked like a child's attempt at graphic design -- a digital "I love you, Daddy," card sent to every computer in the company. In truth, the card -- and, unintentionally, the virus -- was designed by a child, the six-year-old son of the company's vice president of corporate affairs.
10. A beginning graduate student at Berkeley copied down two mathematical exercises from the blackboard, believing them to be homework. Six weeks after he turned in the work, his professor excitedly informed him that he had just solved two previously unsolvable problems. The student's work was quickly published, with a foreword provided by his beaming professor.
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KEY
1. Urban legend
2. Urban legend
3. True story. In the early 1930s, Hungarian Sylvestre Matushka dynamited several trains for this very purpose. His last effort killed 22 people, after which he was caught by police, and summarily freed and employed by the Soviet government.
4. Urban legend
Abby and Kat, best friends forever! :-)
5. True story. In the 1880s, French Detective Robert Ledru voluntarily committed himself to nighttime house arrest after cracking his own murderous crime.
6. True story. Ed Gein, the possible basis for The Silence of The Lambs' "Buffalo Bill" and Psycho's Norman Bates, was arrested in 1957 and died in prison 27 years later.
7. Urban legend
8. True story. The case is cited as an example of a "murderous episode," although it is likely the flicker speed only triggered an already pondered thought produced by a deformed psyche.
9. Urban legend
10. True story. The student, George Dantzig, is now a professor at Stanford University. Taken from Jan Brunvand's Too Good To Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends.
~*~ I got this from ForwardGarden.com.. :)
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