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 had Bramlett Bateman telling the press in 1971 that the creature was “as big as a boxcar” and sounded like a train whistle, and said the Arkansas legislature “briefly considered” making the river a sanctuary.
It is: Bateman testified in 1937, not 1971. “As big as a box car” is what a wire service attributed that year to residents of the river section collectively, and the train whistle appears in no source at all. The sanctuary is the opposite of brief: in February 1973 the General Assembly passed Senate Resolution 23, creating the White River Monster Refuge, where it is unlawful to molest, kill, trample or harm the creature — a symbolic resolution, not a law.
Source: United Press, 19 July 1937; Arkansas Senate Resolution 23 (1973); Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
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It said: The entry said the temple was restored in 1711 under King Thai Sa, and that in December 1960 Prince Birabongse Bhanudej said he had seen an apparition there.
It is: The royal chronicles credit the restoration to the Uparat, Thai Sa’s younger brother and a future king, during that reign. And no contemporary source for the 1960 sighting exists: the story surfaces in Thai forums in the 2010s.
Source: Cushman and Wyatt, The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya (2006).
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It said: The entry stated in its own voice that “the oldest Cherokee accounts” tell of a woman condemned to wear a cougar’s skin for spying on a men’s ritual.
It is: James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee (1900) runs to 297,606 words and contains zero occurrences of wampus, wampas, catawampus or Running Deer. The same search finds panther 35 times, witch 49 and Spear-finger 7, so the search itself works. The oldest datable telling of that story is a 1992 book of Tennessee tall tales.
Source: James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900).
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It said: The entry said Mary, Tinker’s wife, outlived him by nine years in the house.
It is: She died on 4 September 1901 and he on 31 December 1924: she predeceased him by twenty-three years. The entry had the survivor and the survived the wrong way round.
Source: The Tinker family’s recorded dates.
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It said: The entry told, inside a file dated 1948, an episode in which one of these birds seized a child.
It is: That is the Marlon Lowe case, in Lawndale, on 25 July 1977 — twenty-nine years after the date in the title. Three separate things had been folded together: a Lakota tradition, the Illinois press flap of 1948 and a 1977 incident.
Source: United Press dispatches of April 1948; contemporary coverage of the 1977 case.
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The Mount (Lenox, Massachusetts)
It said: The entry said Wharton used the layout of The Mount, built in 1902, as a laboratory for the principles she later published in The Decoration of Houses.
It is: The book is from 1897, five years earlier, and it is co-written with Ogden Codman Jr. The house applies the book, not the other way round — and the co-author had been dropped along the way.
Source: The Decoration of Houses, Scribner’s, 1897.
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It said: The entry said Parkman was accused of embezzling funds from a named railroad company.
It is: No source read connects him with any railroad. The National Register nomination and the state historical commission give a different story entirely.
Source: National Register nomination (W. Warner Floyd, Alabama Historical Commission).
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It said: A Victoria fisherman was quoted in the Daily Colonist of 1933: “it had a head like a horse and moved through the water like a snake, faster than any boat could follow”.
It is: The quotation is not in the paper. Putting an invented sentence inside a real newspaper of a real year is the hardest kind of error to catch, because everything around it checks out.
Source: The Daily Colonist, 1933.
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It said: The entry quoted an anonymous witness — “a wolf that stood and walked like a man” — and routed the quotation through a real, named journalist who covered the case.
It is: The sentence returns nothing: not the exact phrase, not the fragment, not the combination with the road’s name. Attributing an invented quotation to a living journalist is the worst version of this error, and it was removed in both languages.
Source: Web and full-text searches for the exact string.
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It said: A settler was quoted describing the creature crossing the lake “faster than a horse could run on land, throwing water in every direction”.
It is: The original 1868 dispatch — reproduced in full in two newspapers that month, both citing the Deseret News — does not contain that sentence.
Source: The Daily Evening Telegraph, 27 Aug 1868; Daily Ohio Statesman, 1 Sep 1868.
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It said: An earlier version of the entry dated Collie's experience to 1891, explained it as a Brocken spectre and described the Grey Man as over ten feet tall with olive skin.
It is: Collie gave no year ("over thirty-five years ago", from November 1925), reported a sound and no figure, and the physical description entered Wikipedia in 2017 from a reference work of 2016.
Source: The Cairngorm Club Journal, no. 64 (1926)
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It said: The entry quoted an “old climbers’ rhyme”: “Who treads the Lairig alone by night, feels the Grey Man’s step take flight”.
It is: There is no such rhyme. The monograph that collects every poem written about the Grey Man does not contain it, and full-text searches for its two distinctive phrases return nothing.
Source: Affleck Gray’s monograph on the Grey Man; Internet Archive full-text search.
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It said: The entry quoted Ainu elders — “the water burned red, and then it was gone” — recorded by ethnographers around 1913, and treated Volcano Bay as a separate place from Uchiura Bay.
It is: No such ethnographer, date or quotation exists in any traceable source; the quotation was removed along with the 1913 frame that held it up. And Volcano Bay and Uchiura Bay are the same body of water — the entry had it in two places at once.
Source: Full-text search of the Internet Archive book corpus; standard Japanese geography.
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It said: The entry credited the 2010 episode to players of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
It is: They are the home team and do not stay in a hotel in their own city. It was visiting teams: the New York Knicks, on 11 January 2010. The entry had put the story in the mouths of the only people in the building who could not have been there.
Source: Contemporary statements by the visiting players.
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It said: The entry said Narayanrao was killed after the guards misheard a shouted order.
It is: There was no shouted order. There was a written one, in which the verb “dharawe” — seize him — had been altered to “marawe”: kill him. The document was recovered by the judge investigating the murder about six weeks later, and it is the whole point of the story: one letter changed, and a regent died.
Source: James Grant Duff, A History of the Mahrattas (1826).
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It said: The entry said the asylum wound down after the fire.
It is: Four separate events had been merged into one. Ward 5 burned in 1942; the main block was demolished in 1959 because the ground was moving; the hospital went on admitting patients until 1964 and reached its highest ever population in 1965; the last building on the site came down in 1992. The decline came after the peak, not after the fire.
Source: Hospital records and the site’s demolition history.
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It said: The entry said critics pointed to possible tampering with the office’s phone lines.
It is: The post office telecoms service did exactly the opposite: it dismantled the Siemens exchange, left a single test handset with its own counter, went through every possible fault source, and concluded that the calls were being dialled without anyone dialling them. The entry had turned the investigation’s conclusion into the objection against it.
Source: Report of the Fernmeldeamt, Deutsche Bundespost; Herbert Schäfer (1994).
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It said: The entry said sightings continued for decades after the famous photograph of 1936.
It is: All the documented material is earlier — 1848, an account of 1835-1849 printed in 1878, another printed in 1891 — and no sighting after 1936 could be dated at all. A writer in 1930 was already describing the whole thing in the past tense. The photograph is the end of the story, not the middle.
Source: Crowe (1848); Loftus (printed 1878); Marryat (printed 1891).
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It said: The entry said the 1931 earthquake killed several inmates trapped inside.
It is: The heritage file says the opposite. Of 21 inmates, 11 were working in the quarry across the road, outside the walls; several were buried by earth and two were seriously hurt, and it was the inmates themselves who dug them out.
Source: The prison’s heritage file.
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It said: The entry had a parcels clerk describing unsettling cold near closing time.
It is: He said the opposite. In the television interview he described heat — his shoulder, ear and nape getting warm — and he said it during the interview itself, not at closing time. The entry had also removed his name, which he had given.
Source: GMA News, 31 October 2021.
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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 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).
Log updated on October 06, 2026.