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: 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 12, 2026.