Swallowing watermelon seeds will grow a plant in your stomach, swimming right after eating will make you cramp and drown; these are myths we heard throughout our childhoods before we grew up and realized they were false. Or are they? Well those ones might have been, but some urban legends have surprisingly turned out to be true, so let’s take a look:

1. Kidney theft

The Myth: A businessman goes on a trip and in the hotel lobby bar he meets a beautiful woman who offers to buy him a drink. Later, they go back to his room where he suddenly passes out. The next morning, with no recollection of what happened and a severe pain in his back, he realizes his kidney has been cleanly and professionally removed.

The Truth: What may sound like a case of a ridiculously bad hangover actually happened to several hundred men in India. One, in particular, was Naseem Mohammed, 25, a laborer who was desperate for work when he was offered a 3 month painting contract.

He was placed in a house for two weeks, being well fed the entire time as they stalled the job, so he had no reason to be suspicious. After being persuaded to give a blood sample, he was injected and woke up in a hospital with the same pain and scar as the man from the myth.

The culprit was found to be a group of doctors who were running an illegal organ selling business where they supplied human kidneys to the wealthy Indians and foreigners. They were said to be led by Dr. Amit Kumar who was later arrested in 2008.

2. Killer in the backseat

The Myth: A woman is driving home late when a vehicle tailgating behind her continuously flashing their lights at her backseat. When she finally gets home terrified, she realizes there was an escaped murderer about to kill her from the backseat and the other driver was trying to warn her. And thus began a now incredibly cliché horror movie trope.

The Truth: Widely thought to have originated in New York in 1964 when an unsuspecting police officer found a man hiding in the back of his car.  After recognizing him as a dangerous killer, he shot him dead.

A similar incident happened in Chicago in 2013. As a woman went in to pay at the gas station, a man snuck into her unlocked minivan. When she returned, he assaulted her and forced her to drive to an ATM to steal her cash. So remember, always lock your car doors when you’re not around.

3. Body under the bed

The Myth: A honeymooning couple checks into their motel and becomes aware of a horrible odor so bad that they ask to switch rooms. The hotel is fully booked so they send a maid to thoroughly clean the room, but when the couple returns the smell persists. They tear the room apart eventually pulling the mattress off the box spring where they find a woman’s corpse. What happens in Vegas, right?

The Truth: In 2010, 28 year old Sony Millbrook went missing after being last seen at a motel in Memphis. After missing payments, the staff removed her things and cleaned the room to be rented out again. Her family insisted on searching the room but the staff refused and eventually her body was found under the box spring two months later.

Her boyfriend was later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for the murder. In that time, the motel had rented the room to others so people had unsuspectingly slept within inches of the decaying body. I’m sure they’ll give every hotel room they ever stay in a thorough sweep before spending the night again.

4. Someone inside the house

The Myth: A teenage babysitter is watching TV when the phone rings and a man at the other end tells her to check on the children upstairs. When she asks who it is they hang up, and she ignores it as a harmless prank.

When he calls again saying the same thing, she gets worried and calls the police who tell her they will trace the next call. Again he calls so the police trace it only to discover he is inside the house with the children.

The Truth: Thirteen year old Janett Christman was babysitting a 3 year old boy in Columbia, Missouri on March 18, 1950. Around 10:30pm, police received a call from a young girl hysterically screaming right before the line went dead. No one could identify who called because no one was manning the switchboard at the time.

When the child’s parents came back around 1:30am they were horrified to find the house ransacked with Janett’s body in a pool of blood on the floor. She had been strangled with a wire, hit over the head and stabbed with a mechanical pencil several times.

The initial suspect was a local man who had been known to carry a mechanical pencil around and had an interest in Janett, but inexplicably there was little cooperation with the police so he was never convicted and her case remains unsolved to this day.

5. The Realistic Halloween Decoration

The Myth: A lifelike Halloween decoration of a person being hanged turns out to be a real person hanging from a tree.

The Truth: In 2005, a 42 year old woman in Frederica, Delaware hung herself from a tree a few nights before Halloween. Passersby thought it was a prop and admired its realism, until a few days later when someone inspected it closely and noticed it was real.

Urban legends sound realistic because of their plausibility to actually happen and judging by these stories, it’s hard to deny that. Maybe the next time someone tells you an old scary story it might be more true than you thought.

This article was written by The Hearty Soul. The Hearty Soul is a rapidly growing community dedicated to helping you discover your most healthy, balanced, and natural life.

Sources:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-urban-legend-of-the-governments-mindcontrolling-arcade-game

http://www.cracked.com/article_15628_the-5-creepiest-urban-legends-that-happen-to-be-true.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9841877

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/world/asia/30kidney.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNUXDfLanA

The United Nations recently estimated that by 2050 the global population could reach a staggering nine billion. As it stands, there are vast numbers of people who are unable to find enough food for themselves and their family. The situation is already unsustainable, and if we continue to consume food in the way we do in the West the situation is only likely to get worse.

Our gluttonous diets, which have led to unprecedented levels of health issues, have also led us to the brink of humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. The over-consumption of beef and pork means that of the 78 million acres of rainforest that are chopped down every year, around half is for livestock grazing, which is the greatest contributor of greenhouse gasses. Our dietary habits have to change.

There is one solution that has been backed by nearly every governing body charged with the question of sustainability – eat bugs. Just reading the sentence is enough to make most people shudder and recoil. However, incorporating insects into our diet is not only good for the planet, but it is also great for our health. So why is there such a strong stigma against doing so?

Cultural perceptions

Eating insects and other invertebrates is nothing new. From the time of the first human beings, we have eaten bugs as part of our diet. Even today, over two billion people regularly consume invertebrates in their meals. It is largely the cultures of far-east Asia, Africa, and Central America that continue the practice, where some ‘creepy crawlies’ are actually eaten as a delicacy.

In western society, we moved away from eating insects regularly around 10,000 BC when the earliest known form of agriculture began in the Middle East. The region has become known historically as the ‘fertile crescent’ due to its link to early farming and its favorable weather conditions, in comparison with humanity’s ancestral home in Africa.

As our species began farming, bugs shifted from being  a delicious part of our diet to being a farmer’s greatest pest became a culturally held view. No longer tied to having to hunt and gather, agriculture turned us away from our insectivore roots, as we sought to protect the plants that we grew and the animals we ate.

Without the need to eat bugs, and as we continued to push our society on in the name of progress, insects shifted even lower in our cultural opinion, moving from unwelcome pest to abhorrent vermin. For many of us, the idea of crunching down on an insect is detestable. Continue reading →

Buddha, Vajra, Ratna, Padma and Karma described as five different qualities of energy.

All of us possess these qualities, not meant to solidify our egos or to identify one through their astrological signs, they refer to the fluid working basis in which we recognize our current neurosis – our sanity.

Since these families originate from vajrayana tradition, they offer openness which allows us to self-reflect and work on our ability to bring out our intrinsic wisdom. What do they wholly demand? Honest, willingness to see how we are manifesting both sanely and neurotically.

Each of these Buddha families are associated with an emotion which is transmuted into wisdom. The color, element, landscape, direction, season and even the time of day play a role. Changing both physically and mentally over the years, our predominant Buddha family may change when influenced by these factors.

The central Buddha family is essentially Buddha which refers to the quality of space and accommodation. Having no set likes or dislikes, you may be very open to choices. You may not be very expressive and open to excitement, yet you are usually quite enterprising.

The neurosis however of the Buddha family is dullness. You may be living life quite “molasses minded”. Ignoring the vividness life offers as it’s not what you choose to see. A great example may be someone watching TV, uninterested in what’s on, but it’s too much effort to find the remote. Although this may seem quite thick, there is a flicker of wakefulness. You may suddenly get up, clear space and turn off the TV! Continue reading →

Do you get the heebie-jeebies when looking at certain images. Not just any, more specifically, beehives, pockmarked skin, the lotus seed head? Do they make you feel ill? Do you feel breathless? Does your skin start to itch? The truth is, you may be suffering from a condition known as Trypophobia.

Better described as the intense, irrational fear of clusters of bumps or holes, this condition first made airways in 2005. Seeming quite silly at first, it actually is believed to affect up to 20% of the population! Italian computer scientist and musician, Paola Barra describes how she had her first Trypophobic attack when she was just 12 years old. 26 year old Paola described the attack as follows.

“There was an irregular ditch and it was filled with little stones and little holes, and I couldn’t look at it without feeling deep discomfort.”

She started to realize over time that this was no singular occurrence. Whenever she viewed similar images, she would experience “an incredible itchiness in my fingers”.

Over 8 years, she struggled to come to terms with what she was experiencing. She one day decided to do an internet search for a music genre known as “trip hop” and the search engine threw out the word “trypophobia”. Amazed by what she stumbled upon, she started a Facebook group aiming at informing  people about the condition. Continue reading →

Around the world there’s all sorts of craziness and shifting and going on – and many empaths feel like the rug has been pulled out from underneath them.

What’s happening, why is it happening and how long can we expect this to last?

The number of illnesses and deaths that are around right now are just staggering…. just wow. A large number of people are not making it through this change period at all. Youngsters are dying suddenly, there are sudden onset illnesses, relationship ending and…. wow, no wonder we’re feeling like this.

For those of you that are having it easy during this period… just go sit quietly in your corner until we call you okay?

So this is what it looks like is happening…

It’s a major transition period – as August always is after Lion’s Gate. All the lowest vibration people who can’t make the transition to 5D are leaving the plane.

What’s is Lion’s Gate? It’s an astrological event that happens on 8 August each year and is effectively the planet’s new year. It also introduces unity energy and opens a portal for that energy – unity energy is the driving theme of the lightworker mission. We’re here to restore unity. Continue reading →

By Raven Fon

Did you know there are city ruins in North Louisiana that are so ancient, they’re as old as some pyramids found in Egypt?

Poverty Point,  or as it is said in French, Pointe de Pauvreté, is a site of prehistoric earthworks, or mounds. These earthworks were created by the Poverty Point culture,  which thrived from 2200 BC- 700 BC, and reached its peak at 1500 BC.

This is a fascinating culture for many reasons, including: the Poverty Point culture is “one of the oldest complex cultures, and possibly the first tribal culture in the Mississippi Delta and in the present-day United States.”  These native people lived in villages that reached over 100 miles on both sides of the Mississippi River.

Poverty Point is now a U.S. National Monument and World Heritage Site. Located in the Southern United States, it is 16 miles from the Mississippi River, situated in northeastern Louisiana. Continue reading →