Editorial attribution
Diana Clark covers haunted places, paranormal cases and urban legends for Morbid Index, with a focus on tracing a reported haunting or legend back to its earliest documented account and marking clearly where later retellings added detail the original source never supported.
This is an editorial byline. Read our attribution policy and sourcing standards.
38 entries
The Index · Cryptids & Legends
The Point Pleasant reports, the Silver Bridge's documented failure and Mothman's 60th anniversary: what is evidence, what is folklore, and Ohio State's November 2026 events.
Sep 13, 2026
Lore & Explained · Movies
The Blair Witch, Elly Kedward and Rustin Parr were invented for a movie. Here is how Haxan Films built the mythology, how the 1999 marketing blurred fiction and reality, and what Maryland history actually says.
Sep 10, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
Don Julián Santana Barrera really did spend decades hanging dolls on a Xochimilco chinampa. The drowned girl he said he was honoring has never been documented.
Sep 10, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
Stephen King really did stay in Room 217 in 1974 and have a nightmare that became The Shining. Kubrick's film wasn't shot there at all — Timberline Lodge was.
Sep 10, 2026
The Index · Dark History
Anneliese Michel died in 1976 after 67 Catholic exorcism sessions, weighing 68 pounds. Her parents and two priests were later convicted of negligent homicide.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
The Bell Witch story wasn't written down until 1894, seventy-plus years after it supposedly happened. Here's what the earliest sources actually support.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Cryptids & Legends
The Chupacabra began in Puerto Rico in 1995 as a spiny, bipedal creature. Later U.S. reports often involved hairless canids. Here's what contemporary reporting, animal testing and folklore research actually show.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
The Perron family really did live in a haunted-feeling Rhode Island farmhouse for nine years. Bathsheba Sherman, the film's villain, likely never set foot there.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
The man who created the Dybbuk Box has admitted he made up the story. Here's the real 2003 eBay origin, and what a dybbuk actually is in Jewish folklore.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
Kuchisake-onna, the masked woman who asks 'Am I beautiful?', is a real 1978-1979 rumor panic documented in Japanese newspapers, not an ancient yokai tradition.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Cryptids & Legends
The 1934 'Surgeon's Photograph' was admitted as a hoax in 1994. A 2019 eDNA survey found no evidence of an unknown reptile in the loch, but plenty of eel DNA.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
Robert the Doll is a real Steiff toy that belonged to Key West painter Robert Eugene Otto. The Bahamian-servant curse story has never been historically confirmed.
Sep 9, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
"Shadow people" is a modern umbrella term that spread through paranormal radio and internet culture in the early 2000s. Here is what the 2001 record shows, what sleep-paralysis research can explain, and what remains unverified.
Sep 9, 2026
Lore & Explained · Folklore
Search for Mormo today and you'll find a vampire, a demon king, Hecate's consort. Ancient Greek sources describe something smaller and stranger: a nursery bugbear.
Sep 5, 2026
The Index
The Conjuring 2 makes the Warrens central to Amityville from day one. The real chronology is narrower: they arrived after the Lutz family had already left.
Sep 2, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
On September 12, 1952, a group in Flatwoods, West Virginia said they saw a towering figure after a light fell from the sky. Here's what's documented and what isn't.
Sep 2, 2026
The Index · Paranormal
The real Annabelle doll was a Raggedy Ann, not a porcelain monster. What the early reports, Warren claims and Conjuring films actually say about the alleged haunting.
Aug 29, 2026
Lore & Explained · Folklore
Where the Bloody Mary mirror legend came from, what older mirror-divination customs may have influenced it, and why people can genuinely see strange faces in dim glass.
Aug 27, 2026