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: The entry said the theatre survived a fire scare and a mid-century closure.
It is: There is no record of a fire at the Brown Grand. The town's earlier venue, LaRocque Hall (1877), was not destroyed either: the theatre's history says it still stands, and that the Brown Grand was built because Concordia needed a larger, safer house. The documented disaster is the 1967 tornado, whose rain damaged the roof over the stage and permanently stained the original curtain. It did not close mid-century either; it ran as a cinema. (Amended on 6 October 2026: this entry first said an 1895 fire had destroyed the earlier venue, which the theatre's history does not support.)
Source: Brown Grand Theatre, history pages (browngrand.org, Wayback capture of 22 April 2008).
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It said: The giant skeleton is presented as a creature of old Japanese folklore.
It is: It has a birth certificate: it appeared in print for the first time in November 1966, in a magazine feature on “the Japanese yokai right beside you”. There is no earlier trace.
Source: The 1966 magazine feature.
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It said: The entry presented the hotel’s double billing — historic hotel and haunted hotel — as established fact, with a quotation about paranormal activity attributed to hotel staff.
It is: The quotation has no verifiable source, and the double billing is marketing, not documentation. The entry was rebuilt on the hotel’s own material and its heritage listing, saying which is which.
Source: The hotel’s own site; Historic Hotels of America.
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It said: Fourteen entries ended the same way: with a quotation from someone inside the place, and no name.
It is: A museum docent. A veteran visitor. A former city adviser. A regional guide. A local boat skipper. A longtime employee on the Strip. A longtime neighbour. None of the fourteen quotations exists in any source, and none of the fourteen speakers can be identified. That is not fourteen coincidences: it is a shape — the last line of colour, warm and unverifiable, that makes a page feel reported. All of them were removed, and none was replaced.
Source: Full-text searches for each of the fourteen quotations, with positive controls.
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It said: The entry said more than twenty people, including children and maids, had died by jumping from the building.
It is: The only reporter who went to the building and counted wrote of as many as seven suicides in a decade. The youngest person documented was 19, the domestic worker of April 2001 came down alive after ten hours, and one of the deaths happened two kilometres away. The figure of twenty comes from a 2014 travel page with no source.
Source: Anjali Doshi, "The jinx of Grand Paradi", Hindustan Times, 29 October 2006
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It said: The entry said some residents had sought psychological support to cope with living alongside the phenomena.
It is: The session existed and it was the opposite: a suicide prevention session that the residents’ association itself asked a counselling centre to run in 2005, attended by about a hundred neighbours. Turning that into people frightened by ghosts inverts what the community actually did.
Source: Counselling and Suicide Prevention Centre; contemporary press.
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It said: The entry carried a White Witch quotation with no concrete source, and an unattributed ghost account.
It is: Both were removed. The entry was rebuilt on the Barrett family records, eighteenth-century plantation archives and the estate’s own published history — which turn out to be a better story than the invented one.
Source: Barrett family records; Edward Long (1774).
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It said: The entry gave 16 March 1244 as the date of the surrender, and called the escape of the four perfecti with the treasure an Occitan legend.
It is: The capitulation was agreed in early March; the 16th is the date of the pyre, after a fifteen-day truce. And the escape is not the legend — it is the best documented episode of the whole siege.
Source: The inquisition records of the siege.
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It said: The entry added a walled-up skeleton with a crushed skull to the story of the Green Lady.
It is: That skeleton is in no source: zero in the chronicler, zero in the nineteenth-century regional history, zero on the owners’ own site, and zero for any form of “walled up” in the modern monograph — which does return the word “skeleton” twice, so the search works. It is a house motif that travels from entry to entry.
Source: Célestin Port (1874); Tarade (1999); the owners’ site.
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It said: The entry dated the Lady in Gray to at least the early twentieth century, and said the cemetery gate now carries a small plaque acknowledging the legend.
It is: “Lady in gray” and “Camp Chase” appear together zero times in the Library of Congress newspaper archive — where the phrase alone appears on thousands of pages and Camp Chase on hundreds, so the search works. And the veterans’ authority lists exactly two monuments at the site: an 1897 boulder and an arch. There is no plaque.
Source: Chronicling America; US Department of Veterans Affairs monument list.
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It said: The pin pointed at a 40-hectare protected nature reserve in Olt county.
It is: That reserve is 189 km from the forest in the story, which is in Ialomita. The error can be dated: a 2012 television piece moved the legend, an encyclopedia translated that page in 2014, and in January 2016 a database editor attached the English label to the wrong item. The coordinate arrived five seconds later.
Source: Romanian Law 5/2000 (the reserve) and the edit history of the database entry.
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It said: The chair is displayed as the one Thomas Busby cursed before being hanged in 1702.
It is: A furniture historian examined it, found machine-turned spindles and dated it to after 1840 — at least 138 years after Busby died. The curse appears in neither of the two oldest printed accounts of the crime, from 1821 and 1859, which tell the murder at length and never mention a chair.
Source: Adam Bowett’s examination; History of Thirsk (1821); Grainge, Vale of Mowbray (1859).
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It said: The entry placed the origin of the building in the mid to late nineteenth century.
It is: The original house is Georgian, of 1810, and was extended in 1856-1859. The architect’s records of 1890 and the commemorative dates on the building itself agree on 1810.
Source: Architectural records; the building’s commemorative dates.
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Baker Hotel (Mineral Wells, Texas)
It said: The entry quoted an anonymous watchman — “you can feel someone walk past you in that hallway” — and described the hotel’s rooftop pool.
It is: The quotation appears in no search, web or full-text. And the pool is not on the roof: the building’s heritage file explains where Baker actually put it.
Source: National Register of Historic Places file for the hotel.
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It said: The entry’s entire paranormal half rested on two sentences: that the school is reportedly haunted and that activity has been reported there.
It is: Those two sentences had just been deleted from the encyclopedia that carried them — on 19 August 2026 at 19:35 UTC, with the edit summary “remove user-generated source”. Our entry was quoting, as the paranormal record of the place, a claim whose only support had been withdrawn two days earlier.
Source: The edit history of the source article.
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It said: The entry said accounts consistently call the presence benevolent, and described the experience as unsettling.
It is: Both at once cannot be right, and neither is. No witness said “benevolent”: that is the word of the journalist who wrote it up. And the only witness said the opposite of “unsettling” — “it was not a frightening experience at all”. We had also deleted her name and the name of whoever collected her account.
Source: Spooky Isles, 16 July 2021.
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It said: The entry said a djinn could give the powerful and the wise access to hidden things.
It is: The Quran says the opposite, twice. In 34:14 and in 72:26-27 the djinn do not know the unseen — and that is precisely the point of the Solomon episode, where they keep working because they cannot tell he has died.
Source: Quran 34:14 and 72:26-27.
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It said: The entry dated the flowers on the grave as far back as the 1920s, and gave Mary Jay as the name.
It is: The first printed record of the flowers is 1914, and no source gives the 1920s. As for the name, “Kitty Jay” is the form that the printed sources use, and behind it there is a chain that the entry erased: Ann Jay in 1851, Kay in 1876, Betty Kay in 1881. A grave with a disputed name is a better story than a grave with a settled one.
Source: Crossing (1909); Lakeman (2004); parish records.
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It said: The entry said Colombia’s First Lady has never managed to sleep a whole night in the palace because of the noises.
It is: What she said, in an interview of 17 November 2024, is that she has not slept there a single night, because “asustan de noche y no me gusta”. Refusing to sleep somewhere and trying and failing are not the same statement.
Source: Semana, 17 November 2024.
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It said: A tour guide was quoted, supposedly repeating since the 1990s, that “buildings that handled that many bodies tend to hold onto something”.
It is: The sentence does not exist: zero results in full-text search and zero on the web. The attribution was impossible as written, on top of that.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: The entry attributed the artillery marks on the castle to the siege of 1567, and placed them on the south-east tower.
It is: They are Cromwell’s, from 18 November 1650, and they are on the east wall. The parish memoir of 1839, the national heritage file and the castle’s own site agree. In 1567 there was no artillery at all.
Source: Historic Environment Scotland, file LB805; parish memoir (1839).
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It said: The entry said Bedlay's best-known legend was a 'Fat Friar' walled up alive, that a woman in green watched from an upstairs window, and that its twentieth-century owners included the Barr family behind Irn-Bru.
It is: None of the three appears in the 1878 account by Guthrie Smith and Mitchell, in Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer, in the statutory listing or in the modern ghost pages, which describe Bishop John Cameron and a phantom coach on the old Glasgow–Stirling road.
Source: Guthrie Smith and Mitchell, The Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry (1878); Historic Environment Scotland LB4396
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It said: The entry said a body was hung from a tree south of the town instead of being buried, and named the local ghosts: Rotten Johnny Reb, the Death Tree, the Shadow Folk.
It is: Three things are backwards in one sentence: what was hung was the skull, not the body; the remains were found already skeletonised and unidentified; and the tree was in Avilla. Nobody decided against burial. As for the names, none of them exists before the encyclopedia: the skull paragraph was added on 30 October 2009 — Halloween eve — by an anonymous address.
Source: The edit history of the source article; contemporary local press.
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It said: A volunteer of the local historical society was quoted: “New Bern has a lot of old houses, but this one holds onto its history harder than most”.
It is: The sentence appears in no web search and in no book of the Internet Archive corpus. It is a fabricated quotation attributed to a real institution, which is worse than an anonymous one: it lends someone else’s credit to something nobody said.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: The entry attributed the sensations of strangulation reported in the building to an incubus.
It is: The inn’s own account attributes the strangulation to a spirit called Michael, in a chair by the fireplace of the Bishop’s Room, and describes the incubus and succubus as visitors of sleep. The entry had swapped two of the house’s own characters.
Source: The venue’s own published account.
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It said: The entry dated the abduction at the heart of the story to about 1571.
It is: No source gives that year. The oldest printed telling, from 1861, gives none at all, and tradition places the feud between 1426 and the 1470s. The tower itself is dated to about 1500, first named in 1510 and granted by charter in 1538: with 1571 or without it, the building is later than the event it is supposed to house.
Source: Calder (1861); RCAHMS (1911).
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It said: The entry described a ghost hitchhiker who vanishes from the passenger seat, and placed the sightings near Glenluce and Crocketford.
It is: Nobody gets into the car in any documented A75 account. The regional index of the Paranormal Database has three A75 entries across some 6,300 words and not one mention of a lift or a hitchhiker, against 37 of “ghost”. The catalogued sightings are on the Kinmount Straight, between Carrutherstown and Annan — 60 to 100 km east of where the entry put them.
Source: The Paranormal Database, Dumfries and Galloway index.
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It said: Historians say the cipher associated with Perchta has never actually been found.
It is: The inscription is painted on the 1840s portrait of the White Lady in the Rosenberg Hall at Rožmberk, in the Enochian script first recorded in 1583, and the regional daily Deník published a reader's decipherment of it in 2010.
Source: Deník.cz, 15 March 2010; Wolfgang Sauber, Wikimedia Commons (2018)
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It said: The näkki calls people to the shore at night.
It is: In Uno Holmberg's gathering of the tradition, the näkki's whimpering at night is an omen of drowning; the luring is Ganander's singing näkki, by day, in sunshine.
Source: Uno Holmberg, Die Wassergottheiten der finnisch-ugrischen Völker (Helsinki, 1913), p. 201
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It said: The entry said the French merchant who brought the stone to Europe was torn apart by wild dogs.
It is: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier died in Moscow in 1689, aged about eighty-four. He entered Russia that February on a Swedish passport, and his grave was identified in a cemetery there. The dogs are the oldest and most repeated piece of the curse, and they are the easiest to check.
Source: Records of Tavernier’s death and burial in Moscow.
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The Treasures of Catalina Huanca
It said: The entry said the figure and her treasure appear in colonial records.
It is: A historian went through the regional archive and did not find the surname in a single transaction. And in the literary source the entry actually rests on, read in full, the key words of its own account — the mining towns, the vein, the chest — appear zero times.
Source: Carlos H. Hurtado Ames, Regional Archive of Junín; Ricardo Palma’s text (1894 edition).
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Sidi Chamharouch: Shamharush, King of the Jinn
It said: The entry spoke of Shamharush in the present tense, as an intermediary one can still petition for healing.
It is: The three reference sources agree that he is spoken of as someone dead and buried at the foot of the mountain: an ethnographic study of 1926, the inscription on the shrine itself as read in a 1992 monograph, and a 1973 fieldwork account. The entry had also dated its manuscript tradition vaguely; the work exists, has a title, an author and a date.
Source: Westermarck (1926); Hassan Rachik (1992); Crapanzano (1973).
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It said: The entry said the rosary and the bottle are how you get rid of the Saci.
It is: They are how you catch him and keep him as a servant — the opposite use. And they do not even come from the same book: the rosary and sieve are from a 1918 volume, the corked bottle from 1921. In the 1918 book the word for bottle appears twice, and neither refers to the Saci.
Source: Monteiro Lobato (1918 and 1921).
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Queen Pokou and the Crossing of the Comoé River
It said: An earlier version of the entry told the story with a priest, a bridge of hippopotamuses and a cry of "Baouli" at the riverbank, presented as oral tradition, and dated the migration to 1730-1740.
It is: Those details come from Bernard Dadié's literary retelling of 1954. The founding text, Delafosse's of 1900, has a kapok tree for a bridge and a deliberate naming of the country; the two candidate dates are 1730 and 1750.
Source: Delafosse, Essai de manuel de la langue agni (1900); Dadié, Légendes africaines (1954)
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It said: An earlier version of the entry placed the Naale Baa panic in the early 2000s.
It is: No source consulted supports that date. The witnesses place it in the 1990s, and the two dated events they invoke fall in December 1993 and August-September 1994.
Source: Deccan Chronicle, 20 September 2018; CDC, MMWR 43(38), 1994
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It said: The entry gave the Pombero big, backwards-turned feet.
It is: Backwards feet belong to the Kurupi in the folklore literature of the region, not to the Pombero, and no source read gives them to him. Meanwhile the entry left out the one physical trait that has stayed stable since the earliest descriptions.
Source: De Carvalho Neto (1961), p. 83, cited by Aguilera (2023).
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Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful
It said: The Spanish version had Vasilisa separating the good grain from the rotten, and described the three riders as figures who outlive one another. It also said storytellers across Russia hold that the doll represents a mother’s blessing.
It is: The task in the tale is to clean wheat of chernushka — corncockle — not rotten grain. The riders are Baba Yaga’s servants, and the red one is the sun, not the day. And the blessing is not diffuse tradition: it is stated twice in the text itself, once by the mother and once by Vasilisa.
Source: The Russian text of the tale.
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It said: The entry quoted Aleister Crowley’s suicide note as saying the other Boca do Inferno would be merciful.
It is: What the note says, copied by Crowley himself into his diary on 21 September 1930, is: “I cannot live without you. The other Boca do Infierno will get me — it will not be as hot as yours.” The entry had reversed the sense of the line.
Source: Crowley’s diary, 21 Sep 1930, edited by Marco Pasi in Pessoa Plural 1 (2012).
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It said: The entry described the pan-Iberian enchanted-moura motif — the golden comb, the shuttle, the breaking of the spell — and labelled it “of Sintra”. It also said the legend is considered a folk memory of Muslim populations.
It is: It held no Sintra moura at all. And the two founding folklorists of the subject do not support that reading: one calls them female water spirits and declines to explain their origin; the other files them with nymphs and water sprites.
Source: Consiglieri Pedroso (1881); Leite de Vasconcelos (1882).
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It said: The entry quoted an anonymous trapper: “its head was too broad for any wolf I’ve skinned”, and presented the creature as a surviving dire wolf.
It is: The line is not in the only article where those testimonies are collected, nor anywhere else: the exact string returns zero results in full-text search. And the dire wolf is not what the author proposed — in the same article he suggests an amphicyonid, and he puts it as a question, not a claim.
Source: Ivan T. Sanderson, “The Dire Wolf”, Pursuit vol. 7 no. 4 (October 1974), pp. 91-94.
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It said: Villagers were quoted saying “Brosno keeps what it takes, and gives back only bubbles”, and Soviet expeditions of the 1980s were said to have reported sonar anomalies.
It is: The saying returns no source at all. The Soviet expeditions could not be documented either. Both were removed rather than softened.
Source: Exact-phrase search; absence of any locatable expedition record.
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It said: The entry put a quotation in the mouth of a real, named person, and made eight further claims about the 1949 hunt.
It is: None of it is in the contemporary press, which was located and read in full in the Library of Congress archive for 1948-1963. The quotation was removed and the account rebuilt on the wire stories that do exist.
Source: Chronicling America (Library of Congress), 1948-1963.
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It said: The belief was likely rooted in real encounters with large stray dogs, wolves before their extinction in Britain, and the unsettling effect of glowing eyes reflecting torchlight.
It is: No source collected for this entry says so, and none of them treats the Barghest as an animal; the sentence was removed and nothing was put in its place.
Source: Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (2000)
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It said: A “19th-century Yorkshire account” was quoted: whoever beholds it is doomed to die within the year, and its howl can be heard streets away.
It is: The sentence is in none of the nineteenth-century sources that collect the Barghest, all of them read in full. Alongside it went four further claims that no source supports.
Source: Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties (2nd ed.), among others.
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It said: The entry put a ritual cry in quotation marks: “give back what is not yours to eat, Bakunawa!”
It is: It appears in neither of the two colonial vocabularies that record the word — both searched in full — nor anywhere else. Removed in both languages and not replaced.
Source: Méntrida (1637, printed 1841) and Sánchez (1617, printed 1711).
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It said: The entry put a saying in the mouth of the Conwy villages — “where the pool runs still and black, the Afanc waits” — and said Edward Lhuyd held the word simply meant beaver.
It is: The saying appears nowhere. And Lhuyd says the opposite of what he was made to say: read in the original Welsh, he writes that some take this afanc for a corporeal demon, but that he knows there is an animal of the same name. He does not identify one with the other.
Source: John Rhys, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (1901); Lhuyd in the Cambrian Journal (1859), p. 142.
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It said: The entry traced the word yowie to the earliest colonial vocabularies.
It is: The early vocabulary contains no form of it — zero matches, while control words in the same file return dozens or hundreds, and it includes a complete section for words beginning with y. The oldest printed record of the word is from 1875, where it is assigned to the Wailwun and glossed as a spirit that walks the earth.
Source: Ridley (1875), p. 138.
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It said: The entry carried a quotation — “each time it swallows you, a little more of you stays behind” — and said missionaries recorded the story in the 1800s.
It is: The quotation returns zero results in the full-text search of the Internet Archive and zero on the open web. No nineteenth-century missionary attestation could be found either. Both were removed and neither was replaced.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: A “much-quoted” account was attributed to a twentieth-century rubber tapper: “we heard it breathe before we saw it, like a bellows the size of a house”.
It is: Both distinctive fragments return zero results in full-text search and appear in no traceable source. Removed in both languages, and not replaced.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus.
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It said: The entry said the legend took shape in the early 1800s on the basis of seventeenth-century woodcuts of horned hares, and that the animal was hunted with salt as bait, by whistling, and with a young woman as a lure.
It is: The word Wolpertinger has no printed trace before 1957 in the German Google Books corpus and before 1968 in the German National Library catalogue; the horned-hare pictures are older and are neither Bavarian nor called Wolpertinger. The salt, the whistling and the young woman have no source located; the Duden gives the sack and the burning candle.
Source: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek catalogue; Google Books Ngram Viewer (de-2019); Duden, Großes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 1999
Log updated on October 06, 2026.