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Folks Share The Most Unhinged And Unbelievable Rumors They've Heard (30 Examples)
Rumors isn’t just an epic Fleetwood Mac album. They are one of humanity's oldest and most reliable pastimes. Long before the internet gave misinformation a distribution network, people were sitting around fires, leaning over fences, and whispering across school cafeterias about things they absolutely did not verify before passing on. The rumor mill has been running forever.
It doesn't need facts. It doesn't need logic. It just needs one person to say "apparently" and another person willing to listen. An online community recently asked people to share the wildest rumors they'd ever heard, and the thread is an ode to the human imagination. These stories raise serious questions about the people who started them and the people who believed them.
More info: Reddit
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#1
In high school I started getting offers of help from teachers that seemed very random. Then a classmate asked if she could throw my baby shower... Except I wasn't pregnant
Turns out, someone had overheard me telling a friend about how a friend at another school told me she was pregnant, and the eavesdropper thought it was my story. It was MONTHS later before it was brought up, and I'm sure there are still people who thought I had a kid 😂.
RELATED:
#2
My friends started a rumor that the reason I was out of work for two weeks was that I was pregnant. The rumor spread across the workplace like wildfire.
I'm a guy.
#3
It was about myself. I’m one of identical triplets, and we are pretty well known around the city we live in, (have been involved in local music and a ton of community arts initiatives over the years).
The rumor though is that we aren’t triplets at all, just one person pretending to be three different people. I don’t know who started it, but it was because we were all spread so thin we were rarely out together. Since folks just being introduced only ever saw one of us at a time, the rumor grew.
Lukas (he/him, it/its) 5 hours ago
I dunno, I've never seen OP and their "siblings" in the same room... /j
There is one rumor that every Millennial carried through their school years like a treasured heirloom, passing it on to anyone who hadn't heard it yet with absolute certainty. Marilyn Manson, the story went, had several of his ribs surgically removed for reasons that were explained in whispered detail behind the science block and absolutely cannot be repeated here in full.
Every school had at least one kid who knew someone whose older brother had read it somewhere, which was considered airtight sourcing in 1996. It spread across playgrounds, lunch tables, and sleepovers with a velocity that the actual internet would have been impressed by. It was completely false. Marilyn Manson has all of his ribs. He has confirmed this.
The rumor outlived the confirmation by approximately thirty years and is still being repeated today, which is honestly a more impressive legacy than most people will ever achieve.
#4
Had a coworker once going around the company telling the other employees that I had a raging brain tumor and that they all needed to pray for me. She also told them not to tell me about it because I'm such a private person.
There was never a tumor.
Michael Largey 7 hours ago
One letter off. OP was the victim of a rumor, not a tumor. OP should have come up with a good Arnold Swartzenagger imitation.
#5
In high school, this white power kid was a real d**k and bullied others. One day, I started a rumor that he had genital herpes. It spread like wild fire until I heard it back to me from three different people within a week. At the time I thought it was the funniest thing ever, but many years later, I still don’t feel bad because last I heard he was still a racist POS.
Michael Largey 7 hours ago
It's disappointing that people shunned him because of a possible std when they already had a much better factual reason to do so.
#6
As a girlfriend, the wildest rumor I ever heard was that one of my friends was secretly a high end escort for millionaires.
Turns out she just had a sugar daddy phase in college and was really good at investing. Still one of the best plot twists I’ve witnessed.
Before the internet, there was the tabloid. The original rumor distribution network, printed weekly, sold at every checkout counter in America and was responsible for more unverified stories than any other medium in human history. The tabloid as we know it emerged in the early twentieth century, with publications like the New York Daily News pioneering the format in the 1920s.
Big headlines, bigger photographs, and a commitment to scandal. The formula worked then and, remarkably, it still works now. The golden age of the supermarket tabloid arrived in the 1970s and 80s, when publications like the National Enquirer, The Star, and The Globe pumped out stories about celebrity affairs, alien encounters, and medical mysteries.
What the tabloids understood before anyone else was that people don't spread information because it's true. They spread it because it's interesting. A rumor about a celebrity's ribs, a neighbor's secret, or a coworker's alleged behavior travels on pure entertainment value, with facts being entirely optional. The tabloids built an empire on that instinct. Reddit simply gave everyone a free subscription.
#7
I work in a hospital and my job entails using the elevators, A LOT. The doors are notoriously aggressive when closing. Frequent riders know when they are past the point of sensing an interruption and it’s way sooner than you think.
There’s a rumor that there was a doctor that got decapitated by elevator doors, NOT EVEN AT OUR HOSPITAL! Literally today, I had a close call and it was seen by another nurse that immediately said, “Did you hear..?” I immediately knew where she was going and said, “…about that doctor?” And she just went, “I was working at that hospital when that happened.” And then her eyes just kinda glazed over. I always assumed it was just an urban legend that gets passed around healthcare employees. But f**k, it happened.
#8
As a teen a neighborhood kid’s father owned a funeral home and he worked there a little bit.
Rumor was he was f*****g the corpses.
Absolutely no basis in fact.
#9
Martin Scorsese only agreed to direct Goncharov to clear his gambling debts and curry favor with the Russian mob, ended up putting out a career and genre-defining banger.
Rumors with real consequences are not a new phenomenon, but the speed at which they can now travel has changed the stakes dramatically. In April 2013, a hacker gained access to the Associated Press Twitter account and posted a single tweet claiming that explosions at the White House had injured President Barack Obama.
The tweet was live for minutes. In those minutes, the Standard and Poor's 500 Index lost $130 billion in value. One fake sentence, from one compromised account, for a matter of minutes, wiped out the equivalent of the GDP of a small country. The rumor mill, it turns out, has always been expensive. It just used to work a lot slower.
#10
There was a rampant rumor about a girl from my hometown. Supposedly she was pregnant with 8 babies, Oprah was buying her a stroller for them, and she ended up getting a leg amputated (amputation actually happened)- which the babies had stole the nutrients from and had “eaten”it off. I don’t think the girl ever did have a single baby, let alone 8.
#11
That my wife and I are swingers lol.
#12
That guy who owns the casinos that went bankrupt is in the Epstein files.
Long before social media gave everyone a platform to spread misinformation at scale, the people with the most to lose from a rumor had a secret weapon: the fixer. A fixer is essentially a professional problem disappearer, someone hired by the 1% to quietly neutralize damaging stories before they reach the public. They operate in the space between what happened and what gets reported.
The fixer's toolkit is both fascinating and slightly unsettling. It involves relationships with editors and journalists, the ability to end a story before it runs, and the kind of phone calls that don't get documented anywhere. In Hollywood's golden age, the major studios employed entire departments dedicated to managing the reputations of their stars. The rumors might even be true, they just never made it to print.
The role still exists today, just with a more corporate job title and a significantly larger retainer fee. Crisis communications firms, reputation management companies, and high-end PR agencies are all, to varying degrees, in the business of rumor control. What's changed is that the internet has made their job almost impossible.
#13
My sister graduated early and people asked me if it was true she moved to alaska and started working on a farm. neither her or i know where or how that rumor started.
#14
That they were the illegitimate son of a member of a very prominent and historically wealthy family. Because of the implications of his existence, his father was at risk of losing a lot of money in a divorce. So instead, he had hired hitmen to end him and his mother. He was in hiding and working as a waiter under an assumed name. He couldn't go to any authorities because of the influence the man's family has.
It was like listening to someone reading a novel. So much b******t can come from a person who keeps to themselves.
#15
There was this one girl in elementary school that had it out for me. Literally stole money I brought for a book fair and then gaslighted me into thinking I stole her money. Anyway, she started a rumor that I was out in booty shorts (grew up in the middle east where this could get you beat up) kicking a stray cat when we were in 4th grade, another rumor that I was a supporter of Israel and love to wear the star of David when we were in 3rd grade (again the middle east), and then sketched something on the bathroom wall that said “xyz should d*e” and told everyone that I wrote it when we were in 3rd grade. It wasn’t until she tried convincing everyone in 6th grade that she met Zac Efron and he confessed his love for her that people stopped believing her. School was rough.
Gossip and rumor are not the same thing. Gossip is typically personal, social, and relational; it's the currency of human connection, the thing exchanged over coffee about people within your immediate circle. Anthropologists have actually argued that gossip serves an important social function, helping communities establish norms, identify trustworthy members, and maintain group cohesion.
A rumor is something different. A rumor is unverified information about someone or something that travels beyond the immediate social circle of the people involved, taking on a life entirely independent of the original source. It doesn't need to be malicious, but it does need to be unverified, and it does need to travel. The distinction matters because rumors, unlike gossip, have a tendency to outlive everyone involved in them.
The wildest part of every story in this thread is not that the rumors existed. It's that someone, at some point, decided they were worth repeating. And then thirty people online were retelling them decades later. The rumor mill doesn't run on malice. It runs on the very human desire to have something interesting to say. And on that front, it has never once struggled for material.
What is the wildest rumor you have ever come across? Share it in the comments!
#16
My fiance, now wife of 32 years, and I worked in different parts of the same company. She was at a different building. Anyway, one of the drivers between buildings was perving on her hard in the AuT way.
Well, some of the mailroom guys picked up on it and told him my fiance's second job was as a dancer at PinUps, a very expensive high class gentleman's club downtown. This poor sap went every weekend for weeks spending money and waiting for my fiance to take the Stage.
"Please welcome Gemini to the staaaaa-aage!" - cue Warrant's Cherry Pie
This poor guy finally asks her when her shifts were at PinUps. She was equal parts appalled and complimented. Yes, this guy did know we were together. It was weird as hell. It was the late 1990s. The bosses thought it was funny.
#17
There was a rumour that I was a lesbian in like two different schools. I had seriously no idea where that came from considering I hadn’t done anything with a girl nor had the desire to. I still remember that day when this other student came up to me and was like ‘OMG did you hear that there is a lesbian in our class? Her name starts with L’. I was the only person in our class whose name started with L.
#19
Back in the 70's the rumor was that Gene Simmons of the band KISS had his tongue removed and replaced with a cow's tongue. Even at age 12, that sounded impossible and anyone that would believe that must be an idiot.
UnclePanda 7 hours ago
You could tell because post-surgery he was better at wrapping his tongue around his Rs.
#20
One I have heard about myself: I have slept with my boss, slept with multiple male coworkers, slept with the employee who has a grievance against me, that I said “there’s a new sheriff in town” after I got my management position, someone has been calling me “Medusa” (I have dreadlocks), that I purposely got someone evicted from employee housing, that I am a huge b***h to anyone that questions me, that I have no idea how to run equipment (been an equipment operator and do a decent job for the last 20 years)…
All of this since I got my new management position in the last 6 months. I am a female in a male dominated field… as well as being very alternate looking and somewhat POC presenting. I say POC presenting because I am mixed… not mixed enough to be considered POC by POC standards, they call me a white b***h… and by white peoples standards.. I definitely don’t fit in with them either. So now here I am, managing a bunch of radically far right dudes an life is somewhat a hell that I built for myself.
Rick Murray 3 hours ago
Wait, so OP's rumour is essentially that she gets rid of annoyances, and here are the morons to annoy her. Not very smart, are they?
#21
Co-worker went down to South Africa with his wife and she died down there. Everyone speculated that he k****d her. Thought it was people making dark jokes until I got to know him.
During Covid we laid off almost everyone and he ended up working side by side with me and I saw how crazy he was. He kept a camera in his bedroom that watched his gf all day long, he would sometimes have it on his phone throughout the day, sitting at his desk the stream would just be running it was the weirdest sh*t I’d ever seen. If she left the bedroom he would call her upset, she would explain that she went to the bathroom or the kitchen.
He would also talk to his teenage daughter in the worst way I’ve ever seen. Called her a w***e for texting with a guy and took her phone away for 2 years.
At least one of his sons was terrified of him to the point where he seems to have mental problems. Like his father’s anger had left him traumatized to the point where he was unable to hold conversations much less relationships.
He was almost certainly physically a*****e to women and on one occasion a few guys overheard him on the phone yelling and threaten to k**l his gf cause she was putting him on child support. Dude is a psycho he has no real friends at I’m aware of. Thing is he seems like the nicest person when you speak to him. It’s only after you get to know him that you get to see who he really is.
#22
That a teacher at my old high school had been sleeping with one of her students that was over the age of consent (16).
Turned out to be true and she went to jail for it because even though he was of age, she held a position of power/influence over him and it was considered coercion or something. Feel awful for her husband, he was easily one of my favourite teachers.
#23
While in art school we had 9 weekly hours of nude model drawing lessons,each 3 hours with a different teacher. There was a rumor the current nude model (mid twenties) was having an affair with the sculpting teacher (late 40s to mid 50s). Not exactly forbidden but a bit scandalous
Met her 18 years afterwards, turns out it was true and they were together for a very long time and are still good friends
#24
There was always a rumour that one of my high school teachers ate chalk. It seemed a little far-fetched, but maybe not so much because he always had massive amounts of chalk dust all over his clothing and in his hair. And he was a little nuts; during my time in his class he managed to electrocute himself and almost fell out of a second storey window. Then one day during an exam, I saw it. He was chowing down on a delicious stick of yellow chalk.
#25
My husband’s coworkers started a rumor that our baby wasn’t his, but our roommate’s. We never had a roommate.
#26
"Elton John once had to have his seamen filled stomach pumped after a gay o**y..."
(No its not true, but its an insane rumor I remember hearing in middle school).
#27
There was a guy in my high school people talked about named paperboy who apparently did so much acid he was functionally brain d**d and all he could do is ride his bike around and deliver newspapers(I never actually met him so this could just be teenagers making s**t up).
#28
That I got a girl pregnant in Florida. I heard this as a 16 year old virgin. I hadn't been to Florida since I was 12.
Apparently 12 year old me got up to some s**t.
#29
I heard a rumour that a woman I was acquainted with had made up her children that she talked about every time. They didn’t exist.
#30
A kid brought a grenade to one of the rival high schools.
A year later I randomly met a boy a year younger than me that went to said high school. I brought up the grenade. He said it was true.
Because he was one the one who brought it in!
What do you think ?
UnclePanda 7 hours ago (edited)
I inadvertently attended the 20 year high school reunion while visiting my dad. It was very weird to meet my reputation. I always thought I sorta tagged a long, a voice from the periphery, the likely source of that anonymous wisecrack... But those people thought of me as one of the key organizers to many fantastic parties, etc. As far as I could make out, they thought I was Arlo Guthrie's character from Alice's Restaurant (without the musical ability). And without exception, they all thought I was taller.
Rick Murray 4 hours ago
I once managed to convince the first form that milk was in fact cow spérm. That the things attached to cows were mechanically jérking them off, and the result was bottled up and...tipped onto their morning cereal. The only reason that I didn't get in lots of trouble was that it was audacious to the point of ridiculousness, so the teachers (especially the science teacher) were more upset at them for believing such bovine excrement. To be honest, I kept pushing it further and further waiting for them to call me on it, but I think their brains didn't get any further than cúm-cornflakes before existential panic set in. 🤷🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
UnclePanda 7 hours ago (edited)
I inadvertently attended the 20 year high school reunion while visiting my dad. It was very weird to meet my reputation. I always thought I sorta tagged a long, a voice from the periphery, the likely source of that anonymous wisecrack... But those people thought of me as one of the key organizers to many fantastic parties, etc. As far as I could make out, they thought I was Arlo Guthrie's character from Alice's Restaurant (without the musical ability). And without exception, they all thought I was taller.
Rick Murray 4 hours ago
I once managed to convince the first form that milk was in fact cow spérm. That the things attached to cows were mechanically jérking them off, and the result was bottled up and...tipped onto their morning cereal. The only reason that I didn't get in lots of trouble was that it was audacious to the point of ridiculousness, so the teachers (especially the science teacher) were more upset at them for believing such bovine excrement. To be honest, I kept pushing it further and further waiting for them to call me on it, but I think their brains didn't get any further than cúm-cornflakes before existential panic set in. 🤷🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
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