To get so irritated when people pretend things happened to them that clearly didn't?

[CalamityKate]

I was watching This Morning earlier and they had an email from a woman who trotted out the whole "Dug Up Rabbit" story. Of course Colleen and Ruth and Eammon had a right old laugh about it.

Which is lovely, but it didn't happen. It's an urban myth that's been repeated and repeated and repeated - often by celebrities on chat shows.

Snopes

It REALLY irritates me when people do this. Why lie? What on earth is the point of emailing a programme, pretending that something happened to you when it didn't?

I've seen it on forums too - people tell a story that is either clearly a lie (as in the Snopes example) or it just doesn't ring true and you just KNOW it's either completely made up or VERY heavily embellished.

I was actually tempted to email This Morning

My Mum does variations on this - not necessarily urban myths but stuff she said to people at work etc. It is more things she wishes she had said though iyswim. She does it about me and things that supposedly happened when I was a teenager, I have to grit my teeth so hard when she launches into one of her imaginary anecdotes, particularly the ones that feature me.

Wheresthepopcorn: People who forward those emails tend also to believe in conspiracy theories...!

My late great aunt was a lovely lady, she never married and was a Brigadier in the Salvation Army.

For some reason she had no sense of smell. She told me a lovely story once about how her commanding officer had visited her and she had made him a cup of coffee. This was in the days before coffee granules and you had to use "Camp Coffee" out of a bottle. She didn't realise that she had used the Gravy browning bottle instead and given him a cup full of gravy. Because she had no sense of smell, she didn't realise until he had gone, when she was clearing away. He had put sugar in it and everything! She apologised the next day and they had a laugh about it.

I always thought that was a great story. However about ten years after she told it to me, Only Fools and Horses had a similar storyline, when a dinner party is ruined by a gravy/coffee mix up. As OFAH often used Urban Myths as storylines (the dead budgie one is like the rabbit one of this thread) I did wonder whether my Auntie's story was actually true or not. Being the highly religious lady that she was, I doubt very much whether she would have lied. Will never know now.

OMG, I just heard someone telling the hit the floor story!!! About Eddie Murphy and a friend of her sister apparently. I'd never heard it before I read it on here yesterday, how wierd.

Re emails with head such as 'do not ignore this message'.

Last summer there genuinely was an email generated by the local police about an attempted child abduction in a local park.

During a debate on MN re paedophilia I brought this up and was absolutely murdered by some who kept sneerily saying I'd just read it on Facebook (I'm not on the loathsome FB) or was trotting out an urban myth.

Short of posting the bloody thing on MN there was nothing I could do to prove and felt bloody agrieved posters thought I was some scare mongering thicko.

The story (of the abduction not the email!) was in all local newspapers too.

YANBU.

Aside from the urban myths thing, I strongly suspect that at least half of the "AIBU to slap this old biddy who dared to LOOK at my baby/to report this caff for chucking me out for BFing/to have sworn at this utter stranger" threads are complete bollocks.

Many of these could have reasonably happened, I've sprayed hairspray under my arms and put moisturiser in my hair because I've been in a rush so I absolutely believe someone somewhere has glitterised their fanjo pre smear.

There used to be an email supposedly from the Strathclyde police about going to get your car from a multi-storey car park and something had been put on your back windscreen. This was something you didn't notice it until you tried to reverse out of your space. What you did then was get out of the car with the engine running leaving your, purse (that traditional Scottish word for handbag ) on the front seat. At which point some cheeky villain would be off with it.

I could never work out how, if you had to REVERSE out of your parking space, how you could have failed to notice something on your rear windscreen as you would have had to have bloody well walked past it!

And I just loved the notion of the lazy Strathclyde Police who could have just been on the lookout for dodgy blokes in stripey jumpers putting stuff on people's back windscreens, but reject that form of crime-busting in favour of making a brew, eating a kitkat, putting their feet on the desk and just sending out an email instead.

Have heard this one a few times, as a warning to not hang handbags on the back of public toilet doors, including hearing it read out on the radio and from my Dmum-

A lady goes into the toilets in John Lewis, hangs her handbag on the hook on the back of the toilet door. While she's having a wee, a hand comes over the top of the stall and grabs her handbag off the hook, by the time she's pulled her knickers up, it's too late! Handbag contains her purse, house keys, address book, mobile phone etc.

She goes to report it to the shop manager who takes her details. She then goes home, shaken, for a lovely cup of tea. Later on she gets a phone call apparently from the shop, saying they think they've recovered her bag, can she come in and identify it?

When she arrives at the shop, nobody has phoned her and they haven't found the bag. Odd. She goes home again, having been out for about an hour, to find her house burgled- thief got her phone number/address/name from mobile/address book and keys were in handbag!

I've poured orange juice onto my weetabix before, mistaking it for milk.

honest, it's true.
It wasn't in a milk bottle though.

Butter - how does she get back into her house?

nickel I never thought of that- because if she had a DH or someone to let her in then they'd be there later on too when the thief came around! Perhaps she kept a spare key hidden under the doormat- but that's not very safe is it?! Tut tut.

I've done something similar to this by accident-it was so embarrassing. I was telling DH's brother this story about someone I'd heard of who had put petrol in their diesel car and ruined it, then a while later put diesel in their petrol car and also ruined that one-it took me about an hour after I'd told him the story to remember that HE was the one who told me the story in the first place. He had very politely not stopped me to tell me that I was recounting his own story to him, but God I wish he had!

When I was a supply teacher in Canada, another teacher gave me the rabbit hutch story to do as a English lesson. I very much doubt it happened to the caller in the OP.

I couldn't agree more. I was only discussing this with Prince Phillip when we were trekking across the arctic together last week.

I told someone a snippet of gossip, it flew round our little expat community and people were telling me with such authority I assumed it was common knowledge. 3 days later it dawned on me that it had been a DREAM and wasn't true at all!

I have also heard warnings not to put "Home" into your Sat Nav as a destination as cunning dastardly thieves were stealing cars, programming the sat nav for home, then robbing people's houses too as they knew they were out and, indeed, were unable to get home quickly due to having just had their car nicked.

I guess that one tunes in to the popular belief/fear that all burglars are professional, cunning and intelligent "career criminals" like Norman Stanley Fletcher, rather than the sad, desperate, drug addicts, blundering randomly from one crime to another to try to support their habit, that most of them are.

What about the one that says if you eat tomato skins they will roll up in your stomache and puncture the stomach wall like a little spear.

Kaloobear - if it helps, we really did once stop to fill up our car with unleaded and thanks to a leak in the tank actually got a mixture of petrol and rain water. We pulled out of the petrol station and immediately broke down. My car was written off thanks to that. Perhaps you can pretend to your BIL that you were talking about me and got confused.

Some of these stories are not implausible at all. I have made coffee with gravy granules by accident, am often driven to my door by the bus driver, have 2 dogs who wouldn't eat the Christmas chocolates under the tree because they know they're not for them (I've never known a dog that would eat food in the house unless it was given it or the food had been put in the bin) and could read a Harry Potter in 3 hours.

My sister told me the one about the friend with the brother with learning difficulties who kidnaps a dwarf and holds him hostage in order to find out the location of the ring. Both my sister and my mother believe this story to be true.

balloon as a lawyer I defended more than one car their who'd had a go at burglary after the sat nav led him there.

My sister told me the one about the friend with the brother with learning difficulties who kidnaps a dwarf and holds him hostage in order to find out the location of the ring. Both my sister and my mother believe this story to be true.

What story is that?

Someone mentioned spiders in bananas. These stories have actually happened, as they are native to where the bananas come from. Don't click on the links if you don't like 8-legged photos.

here

and in the UK here

The urban myth version is here:

www.snopes.com/embarrass/mistaken/troll.asp

In the version from my sister's friend, the dwarf was mistaken for a hobbit, as the person with learning difficulties liked The Lord of the Rings films.