The Systembolaget Rumours: The Poison That Wasn't in the Bottle
Sweden's temperance state really did poison alcohol. The bottles on the monopoly shelf were the one place it never happened.
Topic
Sweden's temperance state really did poison alcohol. The bottles on the monopoly shelf were the one place it never happened.
A soft drink is only sugar, water and flavouring. So why do we tell each other it is the best-kept secret on Earth?
A king in debt, a dawn of mass arrests, and a fleet that supposedly sailed away with the hoard. The treasure legend is really a story about injustice.
Aprons, passwords, and a murdered stonemason from the Bible. Behind three centuries of panic sits a men's charity that guards a grip.
A windowless brownstone, three generations of Bushes, and a rumour about Geronimo's skull. What the legend gets right about power, and wrong.
A destroyer said to have turned invisible in 1943 owes its whole legend to one lonely man's letters and a book he scribbled in the margins of
A grief-stricken Brazilian blog set out to prove a theory it never believed.
How a Vegas shooting, a vault of unheard songs, and a Renaissance pen name convinced a generation their prophet only pretended to die.
How a grieving fandom turned an undignified death in a Memphis bathroom into a story of a king who slipped quietly away.
A stone owl, a summer bonfire, and a century of watching the powerful vanish behind a curtain of redwoods.
A real 19th-century banking dynasty, and the antisemitic libel that turned a surname into a shadow government
How three ordinary words spoken by presidents became the master key of modern conspiracy folklore
How an ancient fear of the serpent became a 1990s theory that the powerful are shape-shifting reptiles.
A cursed statue, an apocalyptic mural, and a runaway construction budget become a temple for the end of the world.
How a barefoot man on a zebra crossing became the corpse at the centre of pop's strangest rumour.
A real secret society of Enlightenment academics lasted less than a decade — then outlived its own extinction by two and a half centuries
A monster with a known birthday, a known author, and a known copyright — and, within five years, a body of folklore and a child bleeding in the woods.
How a squalid political murder became the legend of the monk who would not die — and why the killer wanted you to believe it
How an infected shaving cut, a slow news season, and a century of mummy fiction conjured a pharaoh's revenge from an empty tomb
A real prisoner of Louis XIV, an invented mask, and the two centuries of storytelling that turned a nobody into a king's secret
Five murders in Whitechapel made a killer. A letter to a news agency, probably written by a journalist, made a myth that will never die.
A polite man in a business suit hijacked a jetliner, collected his ransom, and stepped out the back into the rain — and into American legend.