Nah, back before the internet was a thing everyone had access to, and like Wikipedia in their pockets, stuff like this happened for real, especially in small towns.

Like when I was a kid around 30 years ago people told ghost stories and shit as absolutely real. The information bottleneck is so hard to understand if you're young now. Like cable TV was all of your regular entertainment and it sucked then too. Music was whatever was on the radio for most people. If you really wanted to know something niche, you had to go a long way away to a large regional library. If you wanted to buy something but were a poor average person, you went to yard sales and searched the newspaper classified ads. It was like this up until the turn of the century in most places. Dial up internet was so slow that you couldn't load a single full resolution image before you finished, and there was a 50:50 chance you make a new futa friend in the end. It was a different world. People were much more gullible, or rather even a reasonably intelligent person struggled to cite sources and see through the haze.