If you were looking forward to poisoning your loved ones and playing it off as a holiday accident, don’t look to the poinsettia to lend a hand. The famously “poisonous” seasonal flowers are not poisonous at all.

Today, we remember Francis Bacon mostly for his political and scientific contributions, but the people of Highgate remember him for something else: a scientific urban legend about a food safety experiment that may (or, more likely, may not) have created a ghost chicken.

The myth of the ‘base tan’ needs to die. Like Bonnaroo and flip-flops, the concept of the base tan reappears every summer and gets enthusiastically endorsed by a subset of confused people with dubious hygiene standards.

Did you ever hear about that time Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees? Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? That's because it is.

It's one of those urban legends that just won't die. Was Walt Disney actually cryogenically frozen after he died so that he could be reanimated in the future? No.

During the darkest days of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, a strange rumor arose in the capital city; the mysterious Pérák ("Springer" or "Spring-man") was said to be haunting the alleys and rooftops of Prague.

Well, maybe it's better to say The Blob was based on a "true" story. No one got sucked into a garbage disposal like in the horror movie classic, but reportedly one policeman's hands got sticky and that's equally horrifying.

There is a legend in the mathematics community that centers around Henri Poincaré, the famous mathematician, meting out sweet, sweet justice to a dishonest baker. Perhaps it is untrue, but when you read about it, you'll wish it were.

Today medical journals rarely intentionally publish jokes. How pleasant that in the 1800s they took a more enlightened attitude towards merriment. Sure, it led to a brief period when the public was sure women could get pregnant via bullet, but think of the laughs.

Did you hear the legend that blonds will die out in just a couple hundred years? I did. It turns out that everyone has — because the legend has been around for a couple hundred years. Here's why blonds have spent centuries on the endangered species list.

We know that red mercury makes the manufacturing of nuclear bombs much, much easier. We don't exactly know how it manages to do this, but that's only because red mercury, as far as we know, doesn't exist.

Many people have heard the old metaphor about the frog; if you put one in boiling water it will hop out, but if you gradually increase the temperature of the water it will let itself be boiled. It's meant to warn us about slowly developing dangers in addition to obvious ones.

Mutant alligators slithering through the New York sewers are one of the colorful legends of the city. What got the legend started? And why does one version of it contain pot?