13. Hanging Halloween Surprise

Legend: What is thought to be a hanging Halloween display is actually a hanging human body.

Reality: In 2005 right before Halloween, a 42-year-old Delaware woman hanged herself, but for hours passersby assumed it was merely a Halloween decoration. In California in 2009, passersby assumed the same about a suicide victim whose body was slumped over a porch chair. And in Michigan in 2001, a teenager working at a haunted house accidentally hanged himself to death while trying to frighten customers. (source1) (source2) (source3)

14. Maggot Brain

Legend: An insect enters a person’s ear, lays eggs, and the victim endures untold horrors as the eggs begin to hatch. This was terrifyingly captured in an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery where a tourist in Borneo is tormented after an earwig enters his ear canal.

Reality: After vacationing in Peru in 2013, a British tourist began hearing scratching sounds inside her head and awoke at home to find that fluid had leaked out onto her pillow. Doctors found a “writhing mass of maggots” inside her ear that they feared would eventually make their way into her brain. (source)