This was a real news story, not an urban legend or story I heard; you won’t find it on snopes, or for that matter, cnn.com, google, or by asking on able2know.com either.
I’m pretty sure it happened between like 95-96, if not 97-99, and that it was national news; that I’m convinced of. What happened was that a young boy ate an apple in its entirety, stem and all, and somehow the stem went into his back area and killed him. Now, I know that something that goes down the esophagus goes only to the stomach, so this kid must’ve had something wrong?.. Anyone remember this?
Let’s not get into the details of anatomy right now- can we just restrict this to whether one has heard of this/similar story, not a discussion (just for the sake of specialization, all respect).
But really, I do know how much you’ll want to tell me about the ridiculousness of this concept; I asked on the other site, ‘what if he had a hole in his esophagus?’, and one guy said the only way the stem would’ve gotten to the spinal area is if it had a laser guide and propellers or something :rolleyes:
ageless6 and others: NO GOOGLING THIS I did that quite well, believe me. You cannot google it better than I did. Sorry. Don’t do it. Please. Don’t waste your time.
Also, don’t look here:
[list][li]cnn.com[/li][li]snopes[/li][li]google news, their archived news[/li]
No, I’m not sure it was leg. news at all. I was prob. 12 at the time, and although I think I distinctly remember a fatal newspaper story, I admit that human memory is utterly flawed and unreliable; but there was, I would bet money on, a basis for this memory, a real story of a boy who did die in the news from eating an apple stem. I just checked the archives of the local newspaper where I lived then, The Virginian Pilot; nothing. I’ll ask my mom and sister later; besides that it seems over.
I don’t remember this story at all, but the only way I can think he could have died would have been from choking on the stem/core. There’s the slight possibility of poisoning, since apple seeds have cyanide in them, but I’m fairly certain even the amount in a whole apple is nowhere near enoughto kill a child.
I read, while looking this up, that you’d have too eat 100 apple’s worth of seeds before you ran into a cyanide problem. Nice trivia. I think I heard once Johnny Appleseed killed himself by bonging about 500 seeds, anyways, so there ya go.
Searching on the terms “apple stem” in the Lexis-Nexis database turns up about 210 hits, none of which refer to your story. If it made the major media, it should have turned up in this search.
Anyone remember this?
