I have a few, but I’ll start with this one: Back in the 1980s, there was a persistent rumor that Motley Crue performed the ritual sacrifice of a live baby at one of their shows.
And they got away with it in front of, what, 30,000 fans?
Something about a sitcom star having been in Vietnam. Help me out here
Rodney Allen Rippy’s stomach exploded from eating pop rocks and soda
Well, have you heard about him since then???
And I thought it was Mikey, from the Life cereal commercial (“Hey Mikey! He likes it!”).
Bruce Lee is alive and secretly training in the jungles of Cambodia.
No, that was Mikey from the Life commercial.
Jerry Mathers of Leave it to Beaver told me there’d been
a rumor that he died in Viet Nam.
The totally untrue rumor that Fred Rogers was a military sniper.
and was covered from head to toe in tattoos!
There continues to be a long-standing, and false, rumor that the guy who played Eddie Haskell was later the porn star John Holmes.
On that metric, Errol Flynn aspired to the same notoriety as Milton Berle and Forrest Tucker. Unfortunately it wasn’t true, as told later by his sex partners (his proclivity for young, young women may have been in part a quest avoid comparisons). Flynn even had a large phony appendage that he’d flaunt in his dressing room. He also bragged of a scar on his scrotum earned in battle with a Sinhalese assassin. Flynn also lied about being from Ireland, but seems to only been right about the Irish Curse. Alas, the only remarkable feature of his genitalia, documented in his Vancouver autopsy, was the cluster of warts it bore.
That Paul died.
Similarly, the rumor that Bob “Captain Kangaroo” Keeshan (who had, in fact, been a Marine at the very end of WWII) had fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima, and had received decorations for valor.
Walt Disney’s corpse is frozen and stashed underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.
That Florence Henderson and Barry Williams of The Brady Bunch had an affair. They were mother and son on the show; she, about 20 years older than he.
Similarly: that the guy who played Paul Pfeiffer on The Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson.
Is it the entire corpse? I thought it was just his head.
That Morgan Freeman and Jimi Hendrix are the same person.
I actually hope it’s true, because I used to play regularly at Morgan’s Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, MS. If they’re the same person, that means that Jimi Hendrix has paid me to play guitar.
That Bob Ross was once a Drill Sergeant!
Is it a rumor if it’s true?
Hey, did you hear about <member of currently-popular boy band>? He had to have his stomach pumped at the hospital, and they pumped out three quarts of semen!
That one persisted for at least 20 or 30 years, with just the name of musician being updated as their fifteen minutes elapsed.
There are also rumors that various actresses have XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity syndrome, but none of them have ever actually confirmed nor denied it. It’s plausible, given that AIS women look just the same as XX women, but it’d have to have been a pretty serious breach of medical confidentiality for the rumor to have started, if true.
Unca Cecil says:
BIP: Aisha Tyler was my first wife. (I’m hoping this one takes off!)