What's something that people say is a myth, but actually isn't?

1. I bet a lot of people assume that Johnny Appleseed is a myth. In elementary school, the stories of Johnny Appleseed kind of got thrown in the mix with Paul Bunyan and Washington chopping down a cherry tree. It would be easy for an adult to think back and assume it was just a story. But no. There was really a dude named John Chapman, who walked around the US, dressed like a hobo, planting apple trees and wearing a tin hat on his head, from which he often ate.
   — llort_tsoper


2. Candyman was based on a crime that happened in Chicago. A schizophrenic woman was complaining that someone was trying to break into her apartment at night through the bathroom mirror. People thought she was crazy and never checked into it. The apartment was in a low class housing project that had been quickly thrown together by the city.Turns out she was right and that the abandoned apartment next door had an access point into her apartment through the bathroom mirror. Someone was breaking into her apartment, she was eventually found stabbed to death after neighbors noticed she wasn't appearing around the complex. It is a really freaky story. The housing project in the movie was also real place, Cabrini Green, it was one of the most notorious projects in the United States at the time. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/they-came-in-through-the-bathroom-mirror/Content?oid=871084
   — whirlpool138


3. The $2 bill in America. Try and see how many store clerks will call you out for being a "shitty counterfeiter" when you try to use one.
   — SleeplessShitposter






4. Stress turning your hair grey. I had a few grey strands in the first place but then my last job reduced me to a stressed out nervous wreck and the greys came thick and fast.
   — BeerBattered_Boobies


5. Apparently there's a pretty significant number of people who think narwhals are a myth. Not a myth, just weird lol
   — kiasrai


6. There is a real village called Sleepy Hollow in NY (technically Terrytown, NY with Sleepy Hollow as a hamlet), that was close to the site of several Revolutionary War battles. A headless German Hessian soldier was found buried in an unmarked grave outside the village. There also really was a wealthy Van Tassel family, with a Katarina Van Tassel. The family plot can still be visited in the Old Dutch Cemetery in town. It has become a pretty big Halloween attraction.
   — whirlpool138






7. Saying bloody mary in the mirror. Not that a ghost comes out and gets you, but that staring at a mirror in low light can cause you to start hallucinating faces in under a minute. Edit: [spooky article](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p6466)
   — jpterodactyl


8. W is a vowel in the English language. It’s only used as a vowel in a few extremely old, uncommon words that come from Welsh, but cwm and crwth are actual words in the English language. You can play them both in Words With Friends and get points
   — DanHam117


9. Dry land is not a myth! I've seen it!
   — mightyscoosh






10. How safe the USA really is. It is supposed to be a myth but we are the safest we have ever been in the past 40 years. All index crimes (rape, murder, assault, robbery, grand theft) are at the lowest they have been since the 1970s. Teenage pregnancies and abortions are down as are abortions overall. The homicide rate is 4. For comparison, the UK's homicide rate is 1. [The world is less violent is NOT A MYTH.](https://www.npr.org/2016/07/16/486311030/despite-the-headlines-steven-pinker-says-the-world-is-becoming-less-violent) [There's never been a safer time to be a kid](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/14/theres-never-been-a-safer-time-to-be-a-kid-in-america/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.90bf4fd3c4c9)
    — Th0rst31N


11. Australia.
    — weedful_things


12. The US spent millions in research to create a pen that could write in space. The USSR, in the meantime, just used a pencil. Ha ha, stupid Americans. Except, if you use a pencil in space, the graphite gets everywhere since there's no gravity to pull the small particles that get off the paper. Graphite is conductive so it shorts out the equipment. Whoops. Also the US didn't really spend all that money, they just bought a pen developed in the private sector. That's less of a reversal of the moral of the story, though.
    — xezobe