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
604 corrections published: 4 coordinates · 411 facts · 188 sources · 1 pattern
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It said: The entry attached the ghost to Sophia, and dated the accounts to her lifetime.
It is: The only printed ghost account that can be dated is from 1995, and it describes something else: a figure shuffling in slippers, attributed to a captain who owned the house from 1871 — nineteen years after Sophia died. The entry had the fact the wrong way round.
Source: Omond (1914); Elisabeth Fraser, Tales from Scottish Lairds (1995), p. 98.
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It said: The entry dated the harper’s death vaguely to the seventeenth or eighteenth century and suggested a link to Glencoe in 1692.
It is: Glencoe appears in no printed version that was read. All of them point to Montrose’s raid of 1644. Attaching a ghost to the more famous massacre is an easy improvement to make and an easy one to check.
Source: Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (1936).
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It said: The entry said the building still advertises its haunted reputation, and credited ghost hunters with finding the surgical instruments.
It is: A sweep of the current site — 33 pages — and of 60 archived captures between 2006 and 2020 gives zero mentions of ghosts. The building does the opposite of advertising it. And the instruments were already recorded in the federal heritage file.
Source: The hotel’s current and archived websites; the federal heritage file.
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It said: The entry said the family pulled down the old house in 1793 and built the present one.
It is: The Ricketts were tenants and had left in August 1771. The demolition and the new house were the work of the estate’s owners, a different family altogether. The entry had given the tenants the landlord’s decisions.
Source: Estate records of the demolition and rebuilding.
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It said: The Hamilton County Historical Society had no record of a school at the site of the legend.
It is: The claim came from a Wikipedia edit of 20 October 2008 and was removed from Wikipedia on 4 October 2021 with the summary 'Book has been revised and now acknowledges the schoolhouse'; the 1866 surveyor's map of Delaware Township shows School No 2 on the north-east corner of the crossroads.
Source: Hamilton County Surveyor's Office, Delaware Township, 1866; English Wikipedia, revisions 246581807 and 1048215168
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It said: The entry placed the Prohibition speakeasy in the basement, and presented a man called Calvin as a documented dead gambler.
It is: Every source, the hotel included, puts the speakeasy on the third floor. And Calvin is not a documented death: he is a 1993 author’s conjecture that he “may have been in the film industry”, which we had turned into a specific dead man.
Source: Richard L. Senate (1993); the hotel’s own account.
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It said: The pin fell about 160 m west of the theatre, towards Chapel Street.
It is: The Festival Theatre is at 13-29 Nicolson Street. In a dense district, 160 m puts the reader on the wrong block.
Source: The theatre’s own address.
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It said: The entry gave the launch as April 1943.
It is: She was launched on 21 January 1943. April is the commissioning, which is a different event, and the entry had merged the two.
Source: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
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Union Hotel (Flemington, New Jersey)
It said: A former hotelier was quoted saying “the whole building still feels like it’s holding its breath from 1935”.
It is: The line appears in no source. It was removed, and the entry was rebuilt against deeds, tavern licences, nineteenth-century press and the building’s heritage nomination.
Source: Deeds, tavern licences and the National Register nomination.
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It said: The entry listed a town among those offering a bounty for the tsuchinoko.
It is: Its official site — 3,080 pages, 110 MB — contains zero matches for the creature’s name in any of its three spellings, and zero for either word for prize money, while control terms in the same sweep return thousands. No published list of bounty towns includes it either.
Source: The town’s official website; Kyodo News (2024).
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It said: The entry said the tikbalang leads travellers astray, and that wearing your shirt inside out is the remedy against it.
It is: In the oldest detailed source located, an 1889 collection of Tayabas folklore, the one who leads travellers astray is the patianak, and the inside-out shirt is the remedy against that being, not against the tikbalang. Two creatures had exchanged an attribute somewhere along the line.
Source: Isabelo de los Reyes (1889); Plasencia (1589).
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It said: The entry closed with a former employee telling the local press: “something in this place doesn’t want to leave”.
It is: The hotel’s own site was swept in full — 167,770 characters across nineteen pages, including its complete archive of guest accounts and the press coverage it reproduces itself. Zero matches for the sentence, and zero even for the three-word fragment. Control terms in the same sweep: the hotel’s name 249 times, “ghost” 53, one particular room 9.
Source: The hotel’s own website, swept in full, with positive controls.
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It said: The entry said Madison signed the Treaty of Ghent in the house.
It is: He signed the ratification there. The treaty itself was signed in Ghent, by other people, some weeks earlier. It is a small distinction and a constitutional one, and the house’s real claim to the moment survives it intact.
Source: The ratification records of the Treaty of Ghent.
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The Grove (Stilley-Young House)
It said: The entry said the Whitingtons bought the house in 1984, and gave the owner’s name as Tawyna.
It is: They bought it in March 2002 — an error of eighteen years — and her name is Tami. Both are in the heritage nomination, which one of the owners wrote himself in 2005.
Source: National Register nomination 05001105 (2005).
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It said: The entry carried a quotation from an anonymous location scout.
It is: It is in no source. The prison’s real record is unusually well documented — state archives, two federal court rulings and the corrections department’s own papers — and none of it needed a film scout.
Source: Tennessee State Library and Archives; Grubbs v. Bradley (1982, 1993).
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It said: The entry quoted Arnold Hinshaw — “we didn’t leave because we wanted to” — and named a former owner as Robert W. Lamont, under-secretary of Commerce.
It is: The line does turn up in full-text search — in books about an entirely different haunted house, and in others with no connection at all, never once tied to Summerwind or the Hinshaws. And the owner was Robert Patterson Lamont, Secretary of Commerce under Hoover: a different middle name and a different rank.
Source: Associated Press dispatch; the Commerce Department’s own records.
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It said: The entry stated as fact that a mob hanged a nineteenth-century highwayman from the bridge, and closed inviting the reader to cross it after dark.
It is: The bridge was built in 1901 by a Roanoke ironworks, according to the state heritage file, the highway department’s bridge inventory and the plate on the bridge itself. The hanging is chronologically impossible. The entry also used the real death of a Meridian teenager in 2005 as decoration for the legend, with no source and no connection; that was removed outright. And the bridge has been barricaded since August 2011.
Source: Mississippi heritage file and bridge inventory; the plate on the bridge.
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It said: A museum volunteer was quoted in a regional newspaper of the 2000s: “this town has never really let go of anyone who lived here”.
It is: It exists in no locatable source. The town’s documented history starts with a land grant of 1734 and the laying out of fifty lots — which is where the entry now starts.
Source: Colonial land records of the town.
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It said: The entry quoted the investigator Benjamin Radford — a living, named, findable person — giving a mundane explanation for the image.
It is: The sentence appears in none of his published texts on the case. He did write about it, and what he wrote is available; the quotation was written for him. Of all the fabricated quotations found on this site, putting words into a named living sceptic is the one that could do him actual harm.
Source: Skeptical Inquirer 31.5; LiveScience, 21 June 2007.
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It said: The entry closed with a crew member of Carnival of Souls saying it felt like walking into someone else’s abandoned dream.
It is: No such quotation exists. What does exist is a verified line from the film’s director about the place, published in a book about cult cinema — so the entry now closes with something someone actually said.
Source: Richard Crouse, The 100 Best Cult Films.
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It said: The entry closed with a former officer telling a reporter, on the anniversary, that some of those walls remember 1980 whether you want them to or not.
It is: Neither the officer nor the article exists in any checkable form. The riot of 1980 is one of the worst in American prison history and is documented in detail; it did not need a line that nobody said.
Source: Official inquiries into the 1980 riot.
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Pemberton Hall (Eastern Illinois University)
It said: The entry told the Pemberton Hall story around a janitor and closed with a resident assistant saying you end up wishing Mary goodnight.
It is: The quotation appears in no source. And Mary Elizabeth Hawkins was a real person: born in England in 1877, second head of the residence from August 1910 to March 1917. The legend had displaced a woman whose dates are on the record.
Source: University records on Mary Elizabeth Hawkins.
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Palace Theatre (New York City)
It said: The entry said the ghost is a stagehand called Georgie, killed falling from the grid.
It is: The only documented accident at the Palace is the acrobat Louis Borsalino, of the act The Four Casting Pearls, who fell eighteen feet to the stage on 27 August 1935. The entry had replaced a named performer with an invented one — and Borsalino, unlike Georgie, is in the record.
Source: Contemporary press reports of the 1935 fall.
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It said: The entry dated both the original theatre and the fire to 1907.
It is: The original hall opened in 1890 as the Grand Opera House; it joined the Orpheum Circuit in 1907; and the fire was on the night of 16 October 1923. Three different events had been collapsed into one year.
Source: National Register file (Williamson, 1977); the Orpheum’s own history.
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It said: The entry placed the cemetery near the old Fourth Ward.
It is: It lies between the First and the Sixth, to the north-west. In a city whose wards are the way people locate themselves, putting a cemetery in the wrong one is not a detail.
Source: Houston ward boundaries.
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It said: The entry put the cost of the 1911 fire at about 25 million dollars, and said it destroyed tens of thousands of documents.
It is: The contemporary press put it above 27 million, and the loss of documents is not what the entry claimed either. Both numbers were reachable in newspapers published the day after.
Source: The Evening World, 29 March 1911; New-York Tribune, 30 March 1911.
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It said: The entry called Stephen Jumel’s death in 1832 suspicious.
It is: The documented cause is the injuries from a fall. The murder version enters the record in 1964, and it enters through what a medium said in trance. A claim that begins in a séance is not a suspicion, it is a séance.
Source: Contemporary records of the death; the 1964 séance account.
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Montgomery House Bed and Breakfast
It said: The entry quoted Danielle Egnew, a real and identifiable person, saying “this house doesn’t hide what it is” while promoting the film.
It is: A sweep of 437 KB of the film’s archived official site — every page, including the six press pieces it reproduces in full, from January and March 2010 — does not contain the line. She gave real interviews; this was not one of them.
Source: The film’s archived official site, swept in full.
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It said: The entry said Gertrude died alone, and called Seabury Tredwell a merchant.
It is: No consulted source supports the loneliness, and he was a wholesale dealer, not a shopkeeping merchant. Small words, but the entry was using both to build a mood.
Source: The museum’s own research on the family.
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It said: The entry said locals call Littleport "the town the law remembers", and described a crowd heard marching on the anniversary of the hangings and a ragged figure seen at dusk near the parish church.
It is: None of the three has a source. The ghost lore Littleport records is a dragoon said to walk the riverbank and whispering rioters' voices in Granby Street. They have been removed.
Source: The Littleport Society, "Haunted Littleport" (consulted 8 October 2026), and the publisher's page for Deborah Curtis Watson, Mysterious Littleport (2nd ed., 2015).
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It said: The entry said the five men hanged in 1816 were buried in unmarked graves.
It is: Their names are on a stone that a 1902 account describes as still visible in the church tower at Ely, and a 1901 account gives the same text. Saying the dead were anonymous when their names have been legible for two centuries is the opposite of the record.
Source: Harper (1902); Kingston (1901).
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It said: The entry placed the attraction near the Gare Saint-Lazare and gave 2013 as its opening year.
It is: It was at 18 rue de Paradis, in the tenth arrondissement, more than two kilometres away and on a different metro line. And it opened in May 2011: the press covered it on the 5th and the 7th, and the first visitors went in on Friday the 6th. The entry was two years and two kilometres out.
Source: Le Parisien, 5 and 7 May 2011.
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It said: The entry said Curioni named the species Lariosaurus balsami after Larius, the Latin name of the lake.
It is: Larius explains the genus, not the species. The epithet balsami honours Giuseppe Balsamo Crivelli, who described the specimen in 1839 and declined to name it. Two people, two halves of the name, and the entry gave both to one of them.
Source: Curioni’s and Balsamo Crivelli’s original descriptions.
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It said: The entry had the man paddling at night by firefly light, and called the girl a drowned bride.
It is: In the poem the entry is built on, it is she who paddles the white canoe. And she is not drowned: the poem buries her — “they made her a grave”. Both details were reversed from the only source the entry had.
Source: Thomas Moore, “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp”.
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It said: The entry described the kongamato as local tradition about dangerous water spirits.
It is: The magistrate who recorded it in 1923 states explicitly that the Kaonde did not consider it a supernatural being like the mulombe, but a dangerous animal. Turning an animal into a spirit is the opposite of what the source says, and it is the kind of change that makes a cryptid sound older than it is.
Source: Frank H. Melland, In Witch-Bound Africa (1923), ch. XIX.
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It said: The entry dated the accident to 5 September 1951, and placed the boiler in the lobby with the boy playing by the sweet counter.
It is: It was Thursday 2 August 1951. The heater was under the stairs, and the boy was coming down from the balcony. The local press covered it at the time, photograph included, so every one of those details was checkable.
Source: Albuquerque Journal and Albuquerque Tribune, August 1951.
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It said: The entry closed with a longtime Kaysville neighbour, in a local history interview, saying kids had dared each other to go up there after dark for as long as he could remember.
It is: The line exists nowhere. What makes this one worse is that real interviews with real neighbours do exist and are findable: there was no need to invent one, and inventing one puts a made-up sentence next to their real ones.
Source: The local oral history interviews that do exist.
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It said: The entry treated the tower as having been the MGM Grand continuously.
It is: It was the MGM Grand from 1973 to 1986, and then Bally’s. Names on the Strip change hands, and an entry that skips the changes reads a single history into a building that had several.
Source: Property records of the tower’s successive operators.
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It said: The entry gave a verse — “on the ninth stane they buried him then” — as a rhyme collected from local tradition.
It is: That verse does not exist. And the boiling of Lord Soulis is not folk tradition either: it comes from a literary ballad written by John Leyden and published by Walter Scott in the Minstrelsy. A known author is not oral tradition, and the difference is the whole point of the entry.
Source: Leyden, “Lord Soulis”, in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
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It said: A hotel employee was quoted in a local magazine: “she’s supposed to be one of the more elegant ghosts in Washington”.
It is: The quotation appears in no locatable source. Its only echo is the advertising headline of a ghost tour company — which is where the phrasing came from, not from anyone at the hotel.
Source: Search of the locatable sources; the tour company’s own advertising.
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It said: The entry described the burials as Congregationalist families.
It is: The transcription made for the local historical society says otherwise. It is a small thing to get wrong and an easy thing to check, which is exactly why it is worth writing down.
Source: Katharine A. Prichard’s transcription for the Mattatuck Historical Society.
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It said: The Great Salt Lake was filed under the category “forest”, which the site printed on the page and on its listing card.
It is: It is a lake. The catalogue had no category for bodies of water at all — twenty types and not one of them wet — so one was added in the same change.
Source: The site’s own category list.
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It said: The entry called the house a National Historic Landmark and described it as a municipal museum.
It is: It is not. It has been a New York City landmark since 1966 and on the National Register since 1975, which are different designations. The distinction matters because the entry was using the wrong one as a badge of importance.
Source: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; National Register of Historic Places.
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Government House (Saskatchewan)
It said: The entry called the female figure by the main staircase “the housekeeper”.
It is: The only published sighting describes a woman in Victorian clothing seen through a window. The housekeeper is a label the entry added, and it is the kind of addition that turns an account into a character.
Source: Global News (2015).
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It said: The entry said the Summer School of the Arts arrived after the sanatorium closed in 1972.
It is: The school was opened on 29 July 1967 by the provincial premier — five years before the sanatorium closed. For those five years the two things shared the site, which is a more interesting fact than the one the entry invented.
Source: Provincial records of the school’s opening.
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It said: The entry opened by placing the house near where Grace Sherwood was tried by water in 1706.
It is: The house was built 124 years after that. Opening an entry with an event that predates the building by more than a century is not false in the details, but it is misleading in the frame: it lends the house a history that is not its own.
Source: The building’s own construction date.
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It said: The entry gave three phenomena — children’s laughter in the great hall, footsteps in the minstrels’ gallery, a child in Tudor dress by the dais — as recorded by the heritage body that runs the palace.
It is: None of the three can be attributed to any source. The only traceable ghost account from Eltham is a newspaper piece of 27 June 2009, drawn from the body’s first inventory of incidents, and it describes something else entirely: a former employee who died a week after retiring.
Source: The Daily Telegraph, 27 June 2009.
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It said: The entry placed the creature in a set of Chilean localities.
It is: Those localities return zero folkloric matches in the surveys of 1904-1913, and one of them returns zero appearances of any kind — while control searches in the same sweep return dozens or hundreds for the places that are genuinely attached to the being. The real localities are the ones given in chapter XI of the standard collection.
Source: Vicuña Cifuentes, chapter XI, pp. 38-39.
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It said: The map pin sat at 25.0N, 137.0E — a round number copied from an encyclopedia, in open ocean.
It is: Everything this entry describes — the Myojin-sho eruption, the loss of the Kaiyo Maru No. 5 with 31 people aboard on 24 September 1952, the Bayonnaise Rocks — happens around 31°55'N, 140°01'E, in the Izu volcanic arc. The pin was about 1,000 km from its own subject.
Source: The events named in the entry itself.
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It said: The entry made the ghost a nurse in period uniform walking the upper corridors.
It is: In all five published versions — across three newspapers between 2012 and 2025 — the ghost is the mother whose baby was taken from her, and the nurse is the living person who took it. The entry had swapped the victim for the official.
Source: Otago Daily Times (2012); Critic (2012, 2019, 2021, 2025).
Log updated on October 12, 2026.