Was it real?

Millions of people vividly remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. He didn't. He became President of South Africa and died free in 2013.

Several separate American regions each have their own local legend about disfigured, hydrocephalic children who allegedly escaped a nearby asylum and now live in the woods — and the story is different enough in each place that folklorists don't think they're actually the same legend at all.

One journalist's 1996 first-person account of two unsettling children with completely black eyes asking to be let into his car spawned an entire modern urban legend — and thousands of people online now swear they've had eerily similar encounters of their own.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain all died at exactly age 27 — and decades later, statisticians ran the actual numbers and found musicians aren't any more likely to die at 27 than at any other age in their late twenties or early thirties.

The actor who played TV's first Superman died under mysterious circumstances, and decades later the actor who played the movie version was paralyzed in a riding accident — a pattern of misfortune among the character's stars real enough that some cast members have openly discussed it.

For decades, athletes have genuinely dreaded appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, convinced it curses whoever's featured with an injury or slump right afterward — and statisticians have a well-documented, unglamorous explanation for exactly why that pattern would appear even if no curse exists at all.

Actors have refused to say the play's actual title inside a theater for centuries, terrified of injuries, fires, and even real deaths connected to productions — a superstition so deeply embedded it's still respected on Broadway and in London's West End today.