5 Scary Stories That Sound Made Up (That Really Happened)

The strangest part of the story: When the Sessionses bought the house, they signed paperwork acknowledging the snake problem ... which their real estate agent insisted was simply an invention of the previous owner as an excuse to get out of his mortgage. That signature forced the couple to declare bankruptcy and deal with the resulting financial and psychological difficulties on their own. Because like so many other horror stories with cheap twists, the real villain here was capitalism.

She eventually contacted the Ipswich Borough Council's Rapid Response Team, trying to convince the government that she was being haunted by a nursery rhyme. Though they did confirm that they heard the rhyme too, so good news, she wasn't going crazy! She was probably just being stalked by a supernatural horror.

The team, hopefully armed with iron and salt, tracked the music to a nearby industrial building. The owners explained that the music was a motion-activated security measure meant to scare off thieves, although why they chose a spine-tingling rendition of a nursery rhyme instead of an alarm bell went woefully unexplained. Regardless, the problem was twofold: the volume was cranked up way too loud, and the alarm was being triggered in error by spiders that were skittering across the lens of the security cameras.

So the mystery was solved, and the woman finally got a proper night's sleep. A story's gotta be pretty high on the creepiness scale when everyone breathes a sigh of relief after finding out it was only spiders.

Details are thin, but Wolfensohn doesn't appear to have known that the body was there. The man had died of natural causes, the smell of decay was masked by the smells of the hoarding lifestyle, and Wolfensohn was under the impression that her son had moved out. So either she's a murderer so fiendish that she's fooled everyone, or she's an elderly woman struggling with severe mental health issues. Take your depressing pick.

Wolfensohn wasn't close to her surviving family, so no one had been by to check on her in decades. If there's something even vaguely resembling a happy ending here, it's that she's since been moved to a nursing home, where the people who die of natural causes are hopefully discovered with greater efficiency.

The woman responsible, 50-year-old My Ut Trinh, was motivated by spite over a workplace grievance. She was caught, in part, because she talked about her intentions with a co-worker. Hey, some people take their workplace complaints to HR, and some force an entire industry to its knees while putting hundreds of lives at risk. Different strokes. Trinh's act triggered copycat crimes, and she was denied bail for fear she would harass witnesses, because supervillains are real -- they're just way lamer than you thought.

The investigation centered around the diary of Bhavnesh's brother, 45-year-old Lalit Bhatia. Lalit had taken over as head of the family after their father's death in 2007, and it seems he had gone mad with a moderate amount of power. He believed his dead father was communicating with him, and everyone else in the family just ... went along with that. Lalit began to dictate the daily routines of his family. They cut meat and alcohol from their diets, became more religious, and saw their businesses grow and profit. And then they all killed themselves in a ritual meant to let them meet and thank Lalit's father for his spiritual guidance. A ritual everyone thought that they would somehow miraculously survive.

Psychologists blamed the incident on a shared psychotic disorder. Lalit was delusional, but he had also legitimately helped the family, so no one wanted to be the weirdo who made things awkward by saying, "Hey, maybe group suicide isn't the right move here?" We'll never know whether Lalit believed everything he said, but that's how 11 educated, financially comfortable, well-respected middle-class people killed themselves without making a big deal about it.

Check out all of Eamon Lahiri's work here. For queries about work or his favorite flavor of ice-cream, get in touch at eamon.lahiri@gmail.com or say hi on Twitter.

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