Quantcast
Channel: Oh No They Didn't!
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1561

ONTD Original™: 10 of the Creepiest Stories in Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction

$
0
0


If you're a '90s kid, you probably remember watching this cheesy anthology that aired from 1997 to 2002 on Fox. Although if you have never heard of it, that is not surprising either. Fox would randomly bring it back without little to no promotion. Today, you might be able to catch reruns on Chiller in the U.S. Despite being on for four seasons, there were only forty-five episodes. The basic format was this: the host (James Brolin in the first season, Jonathan Frakes for the remainder of the series) introduced five different standalone stories, whose genres included drama, horror, science fiction, romance, and suspense. At the end of the episode, it would be revealed which segments were based on truth, and which were fabricated by the show's writers. Honestly, even the factual stories were more fictional than the series let on. Yet why spoil the fun? Take a stroll down memory lane this Halloween and revisit the creepiest stories from the series. You can even watch most if not all of the series on YouTube. Click the episode titles to watch those specific segments.


Seven Hours of Bad Luck
Season 4, Episode 3

Story: While moving in, a woman breaks a mirror. Her friend advises her to leave the messalone for seven hours before cleaning it up. This way, she only has seven hours of bad luck as opposed to seven years. The friend reluctantly agrees, and she initially only experiences minor problems like plumbing issues. Once the power goes out, a burglar starts to lurk around outside her home. She fends him off until the power returns. Coincidentally, the seven hours since the mirror breaking have come to an end. She starts to clean up the shards when the assailant enters through a broken window. He finally trips and lands on the pieces of mirror, and he is impaled by a shard. The wounded stranger escapes before the police arrive.

Fact or fiction?FACT. According to BBFoF, a similar event occurred in the Washington D.C. area a few years prior to the episode's airing in 2002. However, the superstition of avoiding seven years of bad luck by leaving the shards alone for seven hours does not appear to be a popular one. Snopes does mention this in its article on the broken mirror myth:"Gather the broken mirror pieces and submerge them in the waters of a south-running stream. (This will wash away the bad luck after only seven hours rather than seven years)."

Grave Sitting
Season 2, Episode 7

Story:A teenager is dared by her friends to spend the night camped out on top of a killer's grave in the cemetery. To prove she was there, she would need to plunge a knife into the burial spot. The teen girl believes she hears a voice from the grave, and she wants to leave. She stabs the ground with the knife, but she can't move. Later, her friends and the cops find the girl, dead from shock, lying on the grave. The reason why she couldn't run away was because she pinned her coat with the knife.

Fact or fiction? FICTION. This is based on an old urban legend often called "The Girl Who Stood on a Grave."

The Prophecy
Season 1, Episode 3

Story:Three teenagers play with a spirit board one night. They contact a ghost named Victor, who claims to be in the attic. When they hear noises in the attic, they toss the board into the fireplace. The next day, one of the friends goes missing and the burnt board has been removed from the fireplace. The two remaining girls use the board to ask where their friend is. The response: "With me."

Fact or fiction? FICTION. The spirit board (also called a ouiji board, a talking board, or a witchboard) was popularized as the Ouija, sold by Hasbro. Many people consider it just a toy, and then there are others who claim it is a dangerous tool. The basic rules for safely using a board can be found here.

Halloween
Season 3, Episode 9

Story:In spite of his wife's disapproval, a man decides to scare the trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. As a storm brews, one trick-or-treater dressed as Death comes to the door, but he is unaffected by the man's antics. The same person returns again and again to torment the man. By the end of the night, the man suffers a heart attack. His wife calls for an ambulance, and she is told that the bridge that connected their area to the town was flooded by the creek. So how did the person dressed as Death reach their house?

Fact or fiction? FICTION. This story may have been partly inspired by the Tales from the Darkside episode "Trick or Treat."

Red Eyed Creature
Season 2, Episode 12

Story:A family is being haunted by a ghostly face with red eyes. The nanny Maggie points out that perhaps the mother and son mistook the red lights emitting from the fixtures for the red eyes. At the end, Maggie's eyes glow, suggesting that she is the apparition.

Fact or fiction? FACT. BBFoF did not give any details as to how this story could be true, though. Apparently there is a similar segment in the obscure,short-lived ABC Family series Real Scary Stories.

House of Shadows
Season 4, Episode 5

Story:A student takes a job house sitting for a man. When she tries to watch TV, the channel keeps switching to footage of a man shoveling cement in a strange room. She eventually investigates a noise in the basement, which leads her to a camcorder playing back the same footage earlier on the TV.Finally, she discovers the house owner's barely alive wife sealed off in the wall.

Fact or fiction? FACT. In the 1980s, something similar supposedly happened in Oregon.

Precious
Season 3, Episode 9

Story: A couple brings in a therapist to help them with their daughter, who has been behaving strangely since the death of her cat, Precious. It has gotten to the point where cat food left out for the pet has been eaten - and the parents worry that their daughter is eating it to prove that Precious is still with them.To get the girl to open up, the therapist asks her to pose for pictures with the invisible cat. The parents and therapist are later astounded to see Precious in all of the developed photos.

Fact or fiction? FACT. The story was inspired by an event that happened in Paris during the mid-1950s.

The Landlady
Season 3, Episode 8

Plot:Mrs. Collins is a widow with a guest house she rents out. When the tenant Mr. Harper could not pay rent, Mrs. Collins kicked him out. The man died sometime after. The elderly woman believes she has a prowler, but the cops come up with nothing. One night, she goes outside and sees footprints inexplicably forming in the mud. This causes her to break down, and she moves away. Even though she moved several more times within the span ofa few months, she could not escape the footprints.

Fact or fiction? FICTION.

)

Kid in the Closet
Season 1, Episode 2

Story: A boy fears something is living in his closet, but no one believes him. He stands up to his school bullies, which includes his older brother. Said brother enters the closet after being dared by his sibling. He accepts and goes in. While inside, the older brother screams. The mom interrupts the fun and opens the closet to only find her son's clothes on the floor. The cops search the house for the missing boy, but he is nowhere to be found.

Fact or fiction? FACT. Some fans of the show have researched this one, and they believe it is more likely that the boy slipped out of the house through the closet somehow and then ran away to a neighbor's house.

The Apparition
Season 1, Episode 1

Story:A woman's fear of a mirror in her house has become debilitating. Whenever she passes the mirror, she swears she sees a dead lady looking back at her. The woman's husband goes out of town, leaving the wife all alone one stormy night. As she wakes up to check on some damage from the weather, she is attacked by a man. Their struggle leads to the mirror upstairs. Upon seeing the ghostly figure in the reflection, the man releases his victim and he falls over the second story railing. It turns out that the woman in the mirror was one of the killer's victims.

Fact or fiction? FACT. As with other episodes in the first season, no information was given by the host about the "factual" stories.





Series Info
Images Source


Has something weird or seemingly unexplainable ever happened to you?

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1561

Trending Articles