Did you hear the one about the escaped-from-a-mental hospital serial killer with a hook for a hand? How about the un-killable man chasing down teens and butchering them in the dark of night on Halloween? More recently, minority gang members in a blood pact to stab, shoot, and otherwise murder women as an initiation rite around NYC? SCARY!
Rumors were flying like eggs and toilet paper yesterday--Halloween--on the Internet, email, and around the water cooler. "I'm really nervous about the stabbing spree that's been going on all day," one friend told me. I was assured that it was totally true, although I hadn't heard anything about it.
Sure enough, blogs and the Internet were buzzing about a supposed initiation ritual for a street gang named the Bloods, that required recruits to murder 31 people to gain entrance to the organization. A Yahoo! message board was even established to validate the Halloween bloodbath--"Is the Halloween blood initiation weekend true?"
Responses included the sensible and curt "no" and "not at all" to the evergreen confirmations like "My cousin's best friend, who was 19, was stabbed last night, and a girl my neighbor knows (age 17) was raped early this morning." Nothing sounds more verifiable than something that comes from your cousin's best friend--who probably heard it from a guy whose half-brother is a cop in Pennsylvania.
While some blogs said that cops were confirming the rumors of a Halloween bloodbath, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly held a press conference to deny that there was any evidence of a gang-on-innocents crime spree. Looking at the NY Post's crime blotter, we don't notice any mention of a spate of stabbings, shootings, or murders that seems out of line for a Friday night in New York. And if the streets were red with blood, it's a good bet that it would be splashed all over the front page of the NY tabloids.
In short, it seems that everyone got a good scare on Halloween that was about as real as ghosts and goblins.
