The Horrifying Reality Behind 20 Popular Urban Legends

2. Waking Up In the Morgue

Legend: A person is declared dead, their toe is tagged, and they’re zipped up in a body bag and placed into a cold morgue drawer, only to awake in claustrophobic darkness and realize to their horror that they’ve falsely been pronounced dead.

Reality: In 2011, an 80-year-old LA woman named Maria de Jesus Arroyo was declared dead of cardiac arrest, zipped up in a bag, and placed in a morgue drawer. When funeral home workers came to pick up her body, though, they found it lying face-down on the refrigerator chamber. She was covered in cuts and bruises, the bag was half-unzipped, and she had a broken nose—none of these injuries were visible when she’d first been placed in the morgue. It is suspected that all the injuries had been self-inflicted after she regained consciousness and that the true cause of her demise had been freezing to death in the morgue. (source)

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3. Buried Alive

Legend: A staple of horror fiction and urban legend is the tale of a person who is either purposely buried alive as a means of torture or accidentally buried alive because they were presumed dead.

Reality: Purposeful “premature burial” of living subjects has been a war tactic used by the Japanese and Germans in WWII as well as the ruthless communist regimes of Mao Zedong in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

In 2011 in Russia, a 25-year-old mother was Tasered by her boyfriend, who allegedly felt she wasn’t pretty enough for him. She was then bound, gagged, placed into a box, and buried in a shallow grave that was covered with dirt and an 85-pound tree branch. But she managed to remain silent during the ordeal and bravely wriggled free within an hour. (source)

beetlejuice

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