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

5

A Family's Dream House Was Secretly Crawling With Snakes

In 2009, Ben and Amber Sessions moved into their dream home in Rexburg, Idaho. It was everything they'd ever wanted, the price was a steal, and oh yeah, during the winter, snakes congregated beneath it like it was a sales conference in Florida.

The snakes, not fond of having their hibernation disturbed, responded to the family's presence like angry poltergeists. They tainted the water supply, were constantly heard crawling inside the walls, and covered the yard to the point where it looked like the lawn was moving. Ben killed as many as 42 serpents in a single offensive, but much like the mythical hydra, the snakes were relentless assholes (little-known hydra fact). The day after their daughter was born, Ben and Amber gave up and fled, not wanting their child to be claimed and raised as the Snake Queen.

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.

4

A Mother And Her Two Children Were Haunted By A Nursery Rhyme

An Ipswich mother and her two young children were being awakened every single night by a tinny rendition of the children's nursery rhyme "It's Raining, It's Pouring, The Old Man Is Snoring." This dragged on for months, and the frightened woman was beginning to wonder if she was losing her mind. Which, of course, is what everyone thinks right before the ghosts sense a moment of weakness and drag their victims to Hell.

3

A Hoarder Unknowingly Lived With Her Dead Son For 20 Years

When elderly blind woman Rita Wolfensohn went to the hospital, her sister-in-law went to her home to pick up some things and found a whole house full of trash and rotting food. As it turned out, Rita was a hoarder. Then the sister found something worse than decade-old Hot Pockets: a clothed skeleton in a second-floor bedroom, believed to have been Rita's son.

2

A Farm Worker Slipped Hundreds Of Needles Into Strawberries

There's a long-running urban legend about needles being hidden in Halloween candy, and it's total nonsense ... because they were in the fruit this whole time. Yes, we've been blaming innocent ol' sugar when the healthy option was the one truly trying to murder us.

An Australian farm supervisor slipped hundreds of needles into her strawberries, prompting 230 complaints and a financial crisis for the industry. Senior citizens were just starting to doubt the veracity of all those Facebook posts about the government putting AIDS in Pepsi, and then needles in their groceries undid all that progress.

Joshua GanePictured: vindication for every paranoid, email-forwarding grandmother in the world.

1

11 Family Members Committed Suicide Together For No Real Reason

When Bhavnesh Bhatia's grocery store didn't open at the usual time, concerned neighbors investigated his Delhi home and found 11 corpses. The 50-year-old Bhatia and nine other family members, ranging from 15 to 45, had all been hanged. Bhavnesh's 77-year-old mother had been strangled without any apparent resistance. Most of them were blindfolded and gagged. Their home was dubbed the House of Horrors, so the title of the Netflix documentary is already set.

From the outside, everything appeared to be going fine for the middle-class family. A wedding was in the works, the teenagers had an upcoming cricket match, both their grocery store and their plywood businesses were humming along. The family had even ordered food which was left uneaten, and made preparations for breakfast the next day. The speculation was that any investigation would reveal some sort of secret shame -- massive financial loses, fraud, dishonor. Instead, police found something creepier.