I went to my hometown for my brother's wake and came back exhausted then slept for a few days. I also went to have an appearance on my favorite show Creature Features. That episode will be on in about 2 weeks yay! :)I have another copy of the book in PDF format to give you. I guess I can't just give out Kindle copies like I thought I could. I'll be sending the new PDF in a few days. The other one had some *cough cough* mistakes. So did the first print copy. It's kind of hilarious but I guess since I did it in a few weeks instead of taking my time these things are bound to happen. Yikes!Transcript of The Mandela EffectGood evening, it’s Spooky Boo Rhodes coming to you from the lighthouse in Sandcastle, California. Today I have for you a spooky scary story about something that might seemed to have happened but maybe not and in such a freaky way that you will assume that it did. Like the mandella effect, which is actually the name of the story.
First I’d like to tell you about my new book that is out. Read along as I read the horror stories of sandcastle podcast to you. Visit the website at www.spookyboorhodes.com to get links to the first edition of the podcast in print or Kindle and more work coming out later. There you will get all of the links to merchandise, websites, social media and everything. www.spookyboorhodes.com
Now let’s begin…
The Mandela Effect
by Shadowswimmer77
A phenomenon I’ve noticed getting more and more attention lately is something called, “The Mandela Effect.” The way it’s described is a collective false memory; a bunch of people remember something happened a certain way, even though every shred of evidence proves to the contrary. The name comes from Nelson Mandela who became president of South Africa in 1994 and died in 2013. Despite these facts, a lot of people remember him dying in prison in the eighties while he was an activist fighting apartheid.
There are a ton of other examples, several of which I’ve experienced myself. I remember the color chartreuse being a shade of pink, almost like magenta. (It’s greenish yellow.) I definitely looked on Wikipedia to figure out when Jif peanut butter shortened its name from Jiffy. (They never did.) And I don’t care what the internet or the books in my parents’ attic suggest, it was always spelled Berenstein growing up. (It was Berenstain.)
Though the general consensus is just that “boy, human memories sure are imperfect,” another half-serious theory about these phenomena is that, at some point, people with false memories have actually crossed over from a parallel dimension almost exactly like the one they exist in now. Those dimensions are so similar, in fact, that the only difference is the one fairly minor detail in question; the Monopoly guy wears a monocle, for example. (He doesn’t.) If someone has a bunch of false memories, by this theory, it would indicate they’ve jumped dimensions a number of times, perhaps slightly flummoxed at the inconsistency of reality with how they remember it, but otherwise unharmed.
Aside from being general, easy to mistake details, the one other aspect that Mandela Effect phenomena share is that people are unable to pin down the specific time that they “crossed dimensions”. In most cases, the false memories originated years ago, often in childhood, but people can’t name the instant things changed.
There was one time I’ve experienced the Mandela Effect, however, that while it comes from my childhood, I remember the exact moment the jump happened. Really, I can pin it down to a period of a minute or two. And the thing that changed…well.
It wasn’t a minor detail.
The summer of 1994 was destined to be memorable for me, one way or another. My dad’s youngest brother, Uncle John, and his wife had just had their third daughter. Their two older girls, Abby and Alison, were aged nine and seven respectively. To help the happy couple get adjusted to the new addition, my dad’s older brother, Uncle Mike, offered to take the kids on a road trip for a couple weeks. Mike was always a bit of an eccentric, not in the least that he always drove an old Winnebago camper around as his primary mode of transportation. I don’t think you could afford to do that these days, what with the price of gas, but I digress. My parents agreed my brothers and I should go on the trip to keep my cousins company.
At seventeen years old, my older brother, Danny, was along for purely practical reasons. Uncle Mike’s plan was to take us up and down a good portion of the mid-Atlantic region to visit distant family members and see some of the sights. Danny was way too old (and cool) to hang out with a bunch of kids still in elementary school but having another person along with a driver’s license to spell Mike made sense.
My brother, David, though…I truthfully thought there was no good reason to bring him along. He was only five and, though I certainly loved him after a fashion, in my ten-year-old mind he was the most annoying little kid in the world. I argued and argued with my mom that he shouldn’t come, that he would only be a hindrance, but she made no bones about it; if I wanted to go then David would be coming too. At last, I relented.
The trip itself was amazing. We started off in Ohio at a festival run by a distant uncle who was the pastor of a local church that had rides and cotton candy, the works. We went through Harrisburg to see Hershey Park and tour the governor’s mansion, lost air conditioning on the way to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and spent time with some second cousins on a river ferry near Annapolis. The trip was scheduled to be ten days long and, looking back, it’s amazing the number of things we managed to see and do in that short period.
The motor home itself was relatively small, as such things go. Sure, there was a small kitchenette, a table, couch, even a bathroom, but there was only one small bed situated up over the cabin. While we were all more than comfortable while driving, there was really no way the Winnebago could accommodate all six of us to sleep. Accordingly, my dad and Uncle John had given Uncle Mike money so we could stay at hotels along the way.
Like I said, Mike was a bit of an eccentric. For one reason or another, we could only stop at Speedway stations for gas, and the only hotels he would stay at were Marriotts. At the hotels we would always reserve two adjoining rooms; one for Uncle Mike and Danny, another for us four younger kids. In the kid room, Abby and Alison would share one bed, and that meant David and I got the other.
If I’d thought David was the most annoying little kid in the world before the trip, well now I was sure of it. I’d shared a room with him at home since shortly after he was born, but at least there we had separate beds. Now, his thumb sucking (he was way too old for that) kept me up late into the night. Once I’d finally manage to fall asleep, I’d inevitably get woken up an hour or two later when he’d encroach my space, his sucking and slurping practically in my ear. It was awful, and after a week I was ready to be done with it.
One last thing I need to make note of: even though the different locations we visited were awesome in and of themselves, some of the most fun us four younger kids had was at the hotel pools. Despite only staying at Marriotts, we were continually surprised by the varying designs at each of the franchise locations. Alison, Abby, David, and I spent hours in the pool at every stop, splashing, racing, and generally having a grand time.
Our last scheduled stop was in New York City, and we got in extremely late at night. I’m not sure how many tourist groups of mostly ten and unders have walked the streets and ridden the subways of Manhattan at two in the morning, but on July 8th, 1994 we made one more. As always, Uncle Mike had booked us rooms at a Marriott; specifically, the one next to the World Trade Center.
We slept in late that morning, toured the Empire State Building, and found our ancestors’ registries on Ellis Island from when they came through. We had just gotten into the base of the Statue of Liberty when Uncle Mike gave us two options. We were due to head home the next morning, and the estimated wait to get to Lady Liberty’s crown was almost three hours; did we want to stay in line or go back and check out the hotel pool? The vote was unanimous.
I remember among his other annoying traits it took David an inordinately long time to change into his bathing suit. He was just getting the hang of tying knots and it made me want to scream watching him fumble with the cord on his suit, vehemently refusing to let me help him. I told him impatiently that every minute he wasted getting ready was one less minute we had at the pool. It closed at six and it was already almost five, but no matter what I said he refused to let me tie the stupid thing for him. At last, David was ready, and we raced to the elevator with the girls.
As I mentioned, despite only staying at Marriotts, we’d seen a number of different pool layouts throughout the trip. Some had cabanas, others diving boards, one with actual palm trees and a fake beach, but this was the first to have an honest to goodness water slide. Even better, this one had three, and best of all, we appeared to be the only guests using the pool. The bottom of the slides dumped into a section that was a sort of annex to the main pool with stairs to the right that you took to get up to the top. There were three flights, fifteen stairs each. A sign posted on the wall read “Slide at your own risk! No lifeguard on duty.” I know because every detail of that pool trip is burned indelibly into my brain.
The hotel pool slide, or one very much like it.The pool itself was a pretty standard hotel affair, nothing to write home about, so of course we started at the slide. We had limited time, after all. I checked my Timex once we
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The original Spooky Boo's Scary Story Time telling spooky, scary stories since 2016. Here you'll find true scary stories, fiction stories, urban legends, creepypasta, and other tall tales from the darkest corners of the internet.
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