She had an autobiography and everything, after all!!
I get Ron Swanson and Nick Offerman mixed up. I don’t know who is real and who is fictional.
Gein, not Guin.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I’ve been in a room where Ed Gein lived for an extended time, and in the room where Jeffrey Dahmer died.
Apropos this thread, I thought Wolfman Jack was a cartoon character for a time.
I thought Super Dave Osbourne was real. I mean, I knew he wasn’t really a stuntman. I thought he was a comedian named Dave Osbourne. I didn’t find out until long after Super Dave became an unknown has-been that he never really was.
Interesting, but no. It was definitely the character from Montgomery’s novels that he thought was real. You’d probably have to be a Canadian to have heard of them/her, but she’s a staple character in Prince Edward Island.
Surprising number of people + 1. Whoa.
I assume they were hospital rooms in both cases.
Similarly: I thought the comedian who pretended to be a bad comedian was actually named “Neil Hamburger.”
If memory serves, wasn’t Dahmer killed in the prison showers?
And I think it was Ted Bundy who used the “arm in a cast” bit.
Oh no, even we unlettered Americans know the feisty, red-haired Anne Shirley who lived on PEI and was adopted by Marilla and her brother who lived at Green gables. I loved those books when I was a girl.
The story sure plays out in a very fictional way.
I thought the Scarlet Pimpernel was a real person. You lied to me, Blackadder!*
*All the other significant encounters in the Black Adder series were with genuine historical figures. Well, sort of.
The prison exercise room.
Oh cool. I was unsure of how far-reaching the stories were.
If you go to PEI, there is a tourist attraction replica of the farm, built to the descriptions in the book, including the adjoining woods and the names of the walking paths therein. It was years after visiting there that the horrible truth finally became known to my father.
On one hand, it’s a pretty thorough and plausible farm replica. On the other hand, there is lots of information about the novels and the life of their author there too.
While I knew the cartoon wasn’t real, I thought Springfield from the Simpsons was the same as Springfield, Illinois. I was really disappointed when we went there and there wasn’t a giant Springfield sign.
According to Wikipedia he was attacked in prison but died in a hospital.
In the 1970’s I learned in elementary school music sessions about Johnny Appleseed and John Henry. I had always assumed they were just well-known folktale characters but were no more real than Peter Cottontail or Santa Claus (yeah, take that to another thr–Oh! You did already!) and, like them, had some fun children’s songs made up about them.
Turns out they were real – and legends among their peers.
—G!
When John Henry was a little baby
Sittin’ on his poor mama’s knee
She took one look at her son
Raised him up upon her hand
Said “My boy’ll be a steel drivin’ man”
…The Ballad of John Henry
…American Folk Song
…[Bruce Springsteen does a great rendition of this one.]
He was pronounced dead in the hospital. But he was gone well before then, according to my sources. I wasn’t there at the time so I don’t know for sure, but my sources were.
For an embarrassingly long time I thought Xena was “real”, in the same sense that Hercules was “real” (ie she was based off actual Greek myths). :o Nope, totally fictional. :smack:
Yeah, that caused me quite a bit of trauma as a kid. I guess it would have helped if I’d learned what “fiction” or “any similarity to persons dead or alive is purely coincidental” meant before I started reading grown-up books.