What we have corrected
A public record of our own errors: what an entry claimed, what is true, and the source that settles it.
Corrections, newest first
473 corrections published: 4 coordinates · 310 facts · 158 sources · 1 pattern
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It said: A nineteenth-century account was quoted: “it moved like a great black snake laid upon the water, and made for the deep before we could row closer”.
It is: The line is in no source, searched whole and in fragments.
Source: Exact-phrase and fragment searches.
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It said: A Kirtland teenager was quoted from a local paper of the 1990s: “everybody’s cousin swears they got chased by one on Wisner Road”.
It is: The line appears in no search, and the attribution has no name, no date and no masthead. Three missing pieces out of three.
Source: Searches for the exact line.
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It said: The entry put a sentence in the mouth of Richard Vincent, a real, named person.
It is: He is a documented witness in this case and what he actually said is on the record. The entry preferred a line of its own.
Source: CBC News Manitoba (2018); Chris Rutkowski, Unnatural History.
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It said: A Filipino saying was quoted: “salt the wound before sunrise, and she never walks whole again”.
It is: It is not an attested proverb. Searching the exact phrase returns only search-engine-bait pages about mythical creatures that paraphrase the folk motif — none with an original in Tagalog or Hiligaynon, none with an author, an informant or a date.
Source: Exact-phrase search; the Philippine folklore literature.
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It said: The municipal authorities of Van were quoted saying “something moved under that water that was not a boat and not a fish”.
It is: It appears neither in the 1997 coverage nor in any locatable source. Attributing an invented sentence to public officials is worse than attributing it to an anonymous witness: it is a statement someone could be held to.
Source: The 1997 press coverage of the sighting.
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It said: Farmers on the shore were quoted: “when the Lagarfljót humps rise twice, the winter that follows will not be kind”.
It is: It is not in the primary collection of Icelandic folklore, which is where this worm is recorded. The belief that its appearance forecasts hardship is real; the sentence was not.
Source: Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur.
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It said: A line was attributed to nineteenth-century missionary and colonial records: “where it lands, the sky itself answers with fire”.
It is: It is in no such record. Searching for it returns only blogs, open wikis and role-playing bestiaries, all of them later than the entry’s supposed source by a century or more.
Source: Searches of the colonial ethnographic literature.
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It said: The entry attributed a quotation to a real newspaper, stated something false about the lake’s fauna, and offered a sceptical explanation of its own invention.
It is: None of the three survives contact with the local press that has actually covered the monster. The invented sceptical mechanism is the subtlest of the three: a debunking that nobody proposed still puts words in somebody’s mouth.
Source: Flathead Beacon (2023); Daily Inter Lake.
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It said: River families were quoted warning: “never point at the boto, or it will follow you home in your dreams”.
It is: It appears neither in the literature on the legend nor in the Amazonian sources consulted. There is a real taboo around the boto, and it is documented — which made the invented one unnecessary as well as false.
Source: The documented literature on the boto.
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It said: The entry carried an invented quotation and two false claims about the water horse.
It is: The primary source that collects the each uisge was read in full — chapter V of Campbell’s 1900 study of Highland superstitions — and it supports none of the three.
Source: John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland (1900), ch. V, pp. 203-215.
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It said: The entry said the Ducketts built the house in the early nineteenth century, and quoted an evicted tenant saying they would never rest easy in it again.
It is: The national architectural inventory dates it otherwise, and the quotation returns zero results anywhere. A curse pronounced by a named class of person is the oldest device in this genre, and it is the first thing to check.
Source: National Inventory of Architectural Heritage.
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It said: The entry presented as a well-known regional saying: “turn the dahu around, and it falls over laughing at you”.
It is: There is no traceable source for that saying. The dahu joke is real and old; the proverb was ours.
Source: Searches of the folklore literature on the dahu.
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It said: “Locals” were quoted — with no name, outlet or date — saying “you don’t drive Clinton Road after midnight for fun”.
It is: The line returns zero results in full-text search, in two different formulations. A quotation with no attributable part is decoration, not evidence.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: A longtime stagehand was quoted telling a local news crew: “you don’t stay alone down there past a certain hour”.
It is: Zero results for the exact line, on the web and in full-text book search. Removed in both languages and not replaced with another.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: A saying of the Amazonian guides was given as commonly repeated: “look at his feet before you follow him, for the forest sends its own to walk beside you”.
It is: Searched whole and in fragments, in English and in Spanish, on the open web and in academic repositories: it appears nowhere. It is not a collected saying, it is a sentence written for the entry. The real detail — the feet — is documented, which is what made the invention unnecessary.
Source: Searches of the open web and academic repositories.
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It said: A regional guide was quoted: “he built this place with his own hands and, if you believe the volunteers, he’s never really left it”.
It is: The line does not exist: zero results for its distinctive fragment in full-text book search, and nothing on the web.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: The entry treated the name of the triangle as old local usage, and dated thunderbird sightings to the 1970s and 80s.
It is: The exact phrase returns zero results in the newspaper corpus, against 143 for the name of the swamp it sits in — so the corpus does cover the area. It is a modern label with a known author, and the accounts it gathers span a far wider arc: the giant snake of the Hockomock is placed in 1939.
Source: Chronicling America; Loren Coleman’s compilations.
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It said: The entry said The New York Times called the place “the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast”.
It is: The phrase “wickedest night spot” does not appear once in the Library of Congress newspaper archive, which covers 1789 to 1963 and includes the relevant mastheads. The line is real enough as publicity; what is not real is the newspaper behind it.
Source: Chronicling America (Library of Congress).
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It said: The entry dated a wild man of the Big Thicket to a specific early period.
It is: The two terms together return zero results in the newspaper archive, and full-text book search turns up only seven popular cryptozoology titles, all published between 2005 and 2016. The date was removed and the figure attributed to that recent literature, with the negative result stated rather than hidden.
Source: Chronicling America; Open Library full-text search.
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It said: A veteran stagehand was quoted, in a later interview with no outlet, name or date: “he’d sit right there in that box like he still owned the place”.
It is: Zero relevant results for either half of the sentence, in full-text book search and on the web. This is a working Broadway theatre, not a ruin: there are people who could have been asked.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: The entry presented the 1909 panic as including an announced reward, and traced the legend to German settlers in eighteenth-century Frederick County.
It is: A full-text search of the Library of Congress newspaper archive returns no occurrence of the word before December 1932, under any spelling, and neither the Smithsonian nor Theodore Roosevelt appears beside the creature in any digitised paper. The only documentable reward is $2.50, offered by a Mobile, Alabama councilman on 31 January 1938. The German etymology first appears, always hedged, in a 1940 guidebook.
Source: Chronicling America (Library of Congress); Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State (1940).
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It said: An anonymous cattleman was quoted: “it stood up like a man but had the head of something out of the old rock, and it screamed once before it was gone”.
It is: Searched across four separate corpora — a book archive, a newspaper archive and two academic indexes — the quotation returns nothing, and the creature’s own name returns only two items, both of them the writings of the man who popularised it. The whole tradition traces back to one author.
Source: Internet Archive; Chronicling America; OpenAlex; Crossref.
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It said: A rhyme was attributed to Leicestershire folklore: “Black Annis’ Bower Close I fear, and Black Annis will have you, my dear”.
It is: It appears in none of the sources that actually collect Black Annis, all of them read in full.
Source: W. Burton and the other nineteenth-century collectors of the figure.
Log updated on October 06, 2026.