How a Lie Created a Haunting

You can literally manifest a ghost into existence just by lying about it. Back in 2006,

a guy named Todd Cobb got a gig to write a guidebook about haunted places in Portland,

Oregon. He bought a fedora to look the part and started interviewing locals,

but honestly, their stories were kind of boring. He had a deadline and not enough content,

so he did something sketchy. He just made stuff up. He wrote about a

bar called Scooter McQuade’s and invented a gruesome story about a Prohibition-era gang massacre happening

in the basement. It was total fiction. But once the book was published, something crazy

happened. People started seeing the ghosts he invented. Bartenders at that specific bar started