A bizarre rumour claiming a man named Phillip Harris was found eating a teenage boy alive in a horror attraction called “Fright Night Haunted Dreams” attraction in Austin, Texas is doing the social media rounds.
The rumour claims that the man was later shot by shocked attraction visitors, but sadly it was too late to save the unidentified teenage boy who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Don’t be too shocked by the story though. It’s not real. It is actually a fictional piece created by a popular fake news website known as Now8News.com. Despite its name, this – isn’t a genuine news website. It is actually one of a growing number of websites that print fake news dressed up as legitimate. There is no disclaimer on the site that explains that it is a fake website.
The article in question reads –
Fright junkies discovered more than they bargained for at a haunted house attraction over the weekend, when they stumbled upon what they thought was part of the show. The Fright Night Haunted Dreams attraction in Austin, Texas brought in hundreds of people looking for a good scare this Halloween season. But on Friday night, this “Haunted Dream” maze turned into a reality for one teenage boy.
However a number of clues give away the story as a fake. Not only has the story not been reported on by anybody whatsoever (pretty unlikely if it were a true story given the nature of the claims) but the photo of the theme park where the incident presumably took place is actually in Ohio, not Texas, and is known as the Haunted Hydro attraction.
The mugshot of the scary looking fellow was also taken from the Internet and has been spreading on the Internet as far back as 2008.
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A quick glance at Now8News.com and you can quickly see that the entire website is made up of purely nonsense stories, including the “story” of a woman who claimed she had sex with Michael Jackson’s ghost and a story about a zombie attack in Tennessee.
Be careful when you share stories like this. Just because the website may look legitimate, it doesn’t mean that it is. Last year a similar rumour went viral that claimed a man walked into a haunted house with a chainsaw and killed 7 people – that story was started by another curious website named DailyBuzzLive.com and was equally as spurious as this one.
It appears this nonsense garners a little more popularity when Halloween encroaches!