Urban legend
An example of an urban legend is a report that years after the defeat of St Clair in 1791 at Ft Recovery Mercer Country Ohio - a skeleton of a Captain Roger Vanderberg was found in Miami County Ohio inside a tree along with a diary; in fact no one of this name was a casualty of the 1791 battle - it was a story that orginated in 1864 from a Scottish novel! Another example of a urban legend is a young woman and her mother going to visit the Paris Exposition; the mother falls ill, the daughter rushes off to get help only to find her mother gone! The woman either goes insane or is told the truth-her mother had the plague which was the reason for the coverup. This became the premise of a 1950s movie So Long at the Fair. In fact the basis for the legend was a story in 1897 in a Philadelphia newspaper...and no other sources in fact!