‘Has anyone started a rumour or story and it has spread?’ – 19 tall tales that somehow became ‘fact’

11.

‘My mum lives in a small Spanish town. Every morning an elderly widower would put a chair and a house plant in the street outside his front door and sit there for the day watching the world go by and singing. For years the popular rumour was that he’d put his wife’s ashes in the plant and that he was singing to her.

One evening she mentioned this to a fellow Brit in the local bar and he was quite shocked as he’d invented the story and never expected it to catch on.’
–newtonbase

12.

‘I was in the private Facebook group that spawned the ‘Lea Michele can’t read’ theory.’
–hannahridesbikes

13.

‘At school, a girl was off, I assume on holiday (back when you didn’t get fined for taking your kid out of school). I told my friends she’d been away and contracted malaria. Got round the school in half a day. When the poor girl came back she was met with sympathy and a peppering of questions.’
–numbpf

14.

‘I did this every summer when I worked in a corner shop. Weeks of boring repetitive small talk about the weather being lovely, so I started ending the exchanges with ‘Yeah, but there’s supposed to be a storm coming early next week’. Without fail after a few days people would start bringing up the storm without me mentioning it.’
–JamezPS

15.

‘A friend, Patrick, used to troll Flat Earthers by pretending to be one and coming out with the silliest nonsense he could think of. One of those things was that ships didn’t disappear over the horizon (because there isn’t one if the earth is flat), but were hidden by ‘water mountains’.

A couple of years later, I saw an actual Flat Earther use this exact explanation, and then later I saw it in a list of ‘crazy beliefs’ on a news roundup site. It still makes me laugh.’
–horsethorn

16.

‘Not a rumour as such but back in primary school, my friend Clifford brought in some quiche for lunch and I started calling him Quiche. 40 years a later he’s still known as Quiche and even his parents called him it when they were still with us.’
–BJWJ96

17.

‘In secondary school I started a rumour that our English teacher worked at Tesco. He wore a button up shirt that was identical to their uniform (the checkered blue one) and it just made sense that he would have a job as an adult. He must have been asked if he had work after school every day for a year or more. Sorry, Mr Alexander.’
–Ru8yG0ld

18.

‘At the Reading Festival 1993, Soundgarden cancelled at short notice. We decided to start a rumour that Blur were the surprise replacement. It was barely a day before we heard the rumour repeated back to us. (There was no replacement, they just budged everyone up the schedule a bit.)’
–InkedDoll1

19.

‘Have you heard Greggs are stopping selling sausage rolls in 2026?’
–First-Bird6799

Source r/AskUK Image Screenshot