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
-
It said: The entry said the legend drew scientific attention in 1893, when a huge carcass washed up at Do Son and French naturalists who examined it concluded it was an oarfish or a decomposed basking shark.
It is: The year is 1883, not 1893. And the rest does not hold either: the examination and the conclusion attributed to those naturalists are not in the record.
Source: Heuvelmans’s account of the stranding.
-
It said: The entry said salt was scattered to stop the flying head from rejoining its body.
It is: In the Chilean sources salt is what the chonchón comes to collect — “come back tomorrow for salt” — not what stops it. The remedies that are actually documented are turning the body face down, hiding or destroying the ointment, the cross of Solomon, the Magnificat and the Twelve Words Redoubled.
Source: Mapuche informants collected by Guevara (1908); El Obrero de Ovalle (1904).
-
It said: The whole description hung on a fabricated quotation: a nineteenth-century sentry who left his post after feeling a cold hand on his shoulder in the empty guardhouse.
It is: Neither the sentence nor the sentry appears in any corpus consulted, while positive controls on the castle’s documented ghosts return results in the same search. The entry was rebuilt around what is documented, starting with four soldiers on the morning of Saturday 23 April 1729.
Source: Full-text search with positive controls; castle records.
-
It said: An anonymous night watchman was quoted hearing “someone walking in shoes that don’t belong to anyone in the building”.
It is: Two full sweeps of the Internet Archive book corpus returned zero matches for the sentence and its variants — with positive controls in the same corpus returning thousands of results for the building itself. The search works; the quotation does not exist.
Source: Full-text search with positive controls.
-
It said: The entry called the keeper’s son adopted, had him die in a sawmill accident, and said the keeper was never found — contradicting itself one sentence later with a body recovered months afterwards. The Spanish version turned “24 miles” into 24 kilometres.
It is: The keeper is named in the US Lighthouse Service rolls, and the station log, the Marquette Mining Journal of 27 November 1902 and the federal case files tell a different sequence. The pin was also 200 m off the position the Coast Guard publishes.
Source: US Coast Guard Light List vol. VII (2025), light no. 14705; NARA RG 26; Mining Journal, 27 Nov 1902.
-
It said: The entry for Bermuda was not about Bermuda: it was about the Bermuda Triangle, and it contradicted our own entry on the Triangle.
It is: It also quoted islanders saying “Bermuda didn’t ask for the Triangle” — zero matches, against 132 and 891 for two control phrases in the same corpus — and gave fourteen men lost on Flight 19 by adding the crew of the rescue plane to the five Avengers. The entry has been rewritten to be about the islands.
Source: Naval History and Heritage Command on Flight 19.
-
It said: The entry named a patient, Jimmy Kennedy, as the source of one of the asylum’s ghost stories.
It is: His name and the asylum appear together zero times in the book corpus, with the search repeated and the same zero returned — while control searches in the same corpus on the same day returned some 22 books for the hospital’s own name. In the university research site devoted to the hospital, 37 articles deep, “Kennedy” appears once, and it is about a television programme.
Source: Full-text search with positive controls; Charles Sturt University research site.
-
It said: The entry placed the barmanou especially among the communities of Balochistan, and its map pin agreed.
It is: The fieldwork this all comes from was done in the Chitral district, in the Hindu Kush of northern Pakistan — more than a thousand kilometres away. Balochistan appears in no source. The coordinates pointed at Quetta, which is at least consistent with the error: the pin and the text were wrong together.
Source: Jordi Magraner’s field report (1992).
-
It said: The entry said Raymond Morris had restored the castle from 1971.
It is: David Maxwell bought the castle in 1971 and had the tower partly restored; he sold it to Raymond Morris in 1985.
Source: Historic Environment Scotland, listed building record LB16664
-
It said: The entry said the Green Lady was a young woman of the Sibbald or Leslie household, and that some accounts placed her after Culloden, in 1746.
It is: Every ghost book consulted identifies her as a Lundie, and no source connects Balgonie's ghost to Culloden. The one Jacobite-era episode attached to the castle is a raid by Rob Roy MacGregor in January 1716.
Source: Richard Jones, Haunted Castles of Britain and Ireland (2003); Martin Coventry, The Castles of Scotland (1997)
-
It said: The entry gave 1998 as the closing year, described J Ward as a wing of the same building, and cited unnamed “staff records” for a hanging.
It is: The hospital closed in 1993 and was dismantled in April 1994. J Ward is the former Ararat gaol, a different building two kilometres away, proclaimed an asylum ward in December 1886 and closed in January 1991. No record of the hanging has turned up anywhere. Two quotations were removed as fabricated.
Source: Public Record Office Victoria, VA 2841; Victorian Heritage Register.
-
It said: The entry followed, paragraph by paragraph, the structure and the gaps of an encyclopedia article, and closed with an unattributed sceptical formula about what “modern scholars” think.
It is: It was rebuilt against the primary source: the Florentine Codex, book XI, chapter IV, folios 70v-73v, read in Nahuatl, in Sahagún’s Spanish and in two scholarly translations.
Source: Florentine Codex, book XI; Anderson and Dibble; García Garagarza.
-
It said: The entry credited the naturalist Ivan Sanderson with a 1925 sighting of his own on Mount Salak, in Java.
It is: Sanderson was born in 1911: he was fourteen years old in 1925, and he was never in Java. His giant bat encounter happened in 1932, in the Assumbo mountains of Cameroon, and it was a different cryptid altogether. Two creatures had been welded into one. The Javanese witness on record is Ernst Bartels, who heard the cry in 1927 and published in 1962 and 1966.
Source: Sanderson, Animal Treasure (1937) and his 1972 book, both read in full; Bartels in Tong-Tong (1962) and Fate (1966).
-
It said: A shepherd’s account “collected in the 1970s” was quoted: it walked upright like a man but stooped forward, and when it whistled the dogs shook until dawn.
It is: It appears in no source. The detail about the dogs is the kind that makes a testimony feel real, which is why its absence matters.
Source: Full-text searches for the quotation.
-
It said: The entry said folklorists read the Tarasque as a memory of the Rhône’s floods or of pagan river cults.
It is: “Folklorists”, unnamed and collective, is an attribution to nobody. The standard study of the Tarasque exists, has an author and a date, and says something more specific than that.
Source: Louis Dumont, La Tarasque (Gallimard).
-
It said: A local rhyme was attributed to the Östersund festivities: “Storsjön is deep and Storsjön is wide, and something older than the town lives inside”.
It is: Zero results for its fragments in full-text search. The monster has a genuine nineteenth-century paper trail and a protection order; it did not need a rhyme.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
-
It said: A lumberjack was quoted on catching one and finding only tears in the sack.
It is: The squonk has exactly one primary source: a short entry in a 1910 book of lumberwoods creatures, digitised and read here in full and compared sentence by sentence with our own. The quotation is not in it. When a creature has one source, checking is not hard.
Source: William T. Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (1910).
-
It said: An anonymous rancher was quoted, before investigators in the 1990s: “it looked at me like it knew exactly what I was thinking”.
It is: Full-text search returns two results, both of them unrelated novels. The line reads like testimony because it is written like testimony.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
-
It said: A rancher’s account “kept in local press archives” was quoted, describing a wolf’s head, a hyena’s sloping back and jaws that could snap a bone.
It is: Phrase searches in the newspaper archive return nothing. The animal itself is real enough as a specimen; the account was not.
Source: Chronicling America (Library of Congress).
-
It said: A trapper interviewed by folklorists in the 1930s was quoted in Cajun French: “mon père disait que le rougarou marche la nuit du vendredi…”
It is: It appears in no web search and in no book of the full-text corpus. Writing an invented quotation in the community’s own language is not a flourish: it is what makes it convincing.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
-
It said: A line was given as collected traditional narrative: “she left her body sleeping, and returned only in pieces before dawn”.
It is: It is not in the digitised primary source for the passage, read in full. The being is well attested; the sentence dressed as fieldwork was not.
Source: W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic (1900).
-
It said: The entry treated the Ozark Howler as long-standing regional folklore.
It is: The exact phrase returns zero results in the Library of Congress newspaper archive for 1800-1963, and zero for its variant. Full-text book search returns about fifteen hits, all in popular titles published after 2008. Whatever it is, it is recent.
Source: Chronicling America; Internet Archive full-text search.
-
It said: A Tohoku fisherman’s nineteenth-century warning was quoted: “if she asks you to hold her child, do not — the bundle grows heavier than stone and will not let you go”.
It is: Four different search strings, including the fisherman himself, return zero results each. Neither the man nor the line exists. The motif does — but it belongs to a different regional legend, which is where it has now been sent back.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
-
It said: An “old saying” was quoted: “wash na yer feet in the sea by nicht, or the Nuckelavee will tak’ ye outright”.
It is: It is not in the collector who recorded the Nuckelavee, and it appears in no search. Written in dialect, it reads older than anything actually attested — which is what dialect spelling is doing there.
Source: Walter Traill Dennison’s Orkney collections.
-
It said: The entry quoted, inside testimony supposedly collected by British colonial officers, the line “look upon it and you will never sleep soundly again”, and reported an expedition finding.
It is: The quotation does not exist, and the expedition finding never happened. The region the entry named was not even a real administrative division.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
-
It said: A muleteer’s warning “recorded in the nineteenth century” was quoted: “don’t cross where the water turns in circles, the fox’s tail waits down there”.
It is: It is in neither of the two standard Chilean sources for this being, nor in any search: the only hits are open wikis. The whirlpool belief is genuine; the muleteer was not.
Source: Guevara (1908); Lenz, Diccionario etimolójico (1905-1910).
-
It said: The entry quoted Martin Sheffield’s 1922 letter describing a “long-necked, swan-headed creature”.
It is: That wording is not from any 1922 source: it is the phrasing of a modern popular article about the case, put back into the letter it was summarising. The quotation marks turned a summary into testimony.
Source: Sheffield’s letter to Clemente Onelli (1922).
-
It said: A Falmouth saying of autumn 1976 was quoted: “when Morgawr comes to the bay, best keep the nets ashore that day”.
It is: It does not exist, searched whole and in fragments. The 1976 flap is real and well documented; the proverb attached to it was not.
Source: Searches of the 1976 press coverage.
-
It said: The entry quoted Doris Harrison, a real named witness, telling reporters the creature was “big, black and hairy, and it smelled just terrible, like something dead”.
It is: That wording appears in no source. She was fifteen at the time and what she did tell the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1972 — reprinted by the same paper in 2022 — is different, and specific. The entry had also demoted the chief of police to a municipal constable and turned a thirteen-centimetre mark into three-toed prints.
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1972, reprinted 2022); Associated Press (2012).
-
It said: The entry had Hichens reporting that witnesses described the fur as “grey, like that of a donkey”.
It is: In his actual text the donkey is a comparison of size, not colour: “a gigantic cat, striped like a tabby, but as large as a donkey”. A striped cat had been turned into a grey one by moving one word.
Source: Hichens, Discovery, December 1937, pp. 369-373.
-
It said: The entry began the minhocão’s written history in 1877, and quoted a nineteenth-century settler on ground opening “as though plowed by a monstrous plow”, with the stream running blood-coloured for two days.
It is: The quotation is in none of the primary sources. What the original actually says is that the river ran turbid for fourteen days. And the written history starts thirty years earlier: a note read to the French academy of sciences on 28 December 1846, reprinted in English in July 1847 — describing a different animal altogether, aquatic, black and short, that seizes horses and cattle by the belly.
Source: Fritz Müller (1877) and his letter to Darwin, 25 March 1877; Saint-Hilaire (1846).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
Log updated on October 12, 2026.