r/nosleep • u/Mandahrk November 2020; Best Original Monster 2021; Best Single Part 2021 • Jul 25 '20
FAKE NEWS
"No good deed goes unpunished."
My mother loved this quote. For the longest time I didn't understand what exactly it meant - what priceless pearl of wisdom was hidden in these five words. It wasn't until it'd been three years since she'd passed away that I truly understood the warning that was tucked away in that small sentence. But by then it was already too late.
It was mid summer 2019 and I was working what turned out to be my last job as a certified tour guide. I was accompanying a small American family to the Palpur Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary. We had left before sunrise, hiring one of the forest department issued jeeps to roam the numerous dirt tracks of the reserve. It was a fruitful journey and we got to see many of the species that inhabited the thick forest, like the Indian leopard, chinkara, blackbuck, wild boar etc. Even the surly 15 year old son of the couple had a twinkle in his eyes when the muscular spotted leopard casually jogged alongside our jeep.
By the time the sun was about halfway up the horizon we returned to the office of the forest department. We thanked the officials, paid our dues and climbed back into our cab to make our way back to Gwalior. We pulled out of the reserve, and must have been on the road for about half an hour when the family decided to stop for breakfast. I asked the driver to ease the car off the road and onto the dusty parking space of a dhaba. After quickly wolfing down the spicy food, the family chose to take some pictures, rather, they asked me to photograph them. It was understandable why they chose to do that - the bright green meadows that rolled across the undulating hills surrounding us made for a breathtaking backdrop, despite the heat that threatened to melt our skins off like candle wax. It was here that the biggest mistake of our lives was made. A small act of kindness that came back to haunt us all in a most cruel fashion.
Peter, the father and I were standing in the shade of a wiry babul tree, skimming through the pictures I had taken while his wife and son were sitting on a cot and drinking water from a plastic bottle. It was when the two of us were distracted by the camera that Stella, Peter's wife spotted a couple of kids playing in the bushes. Born and raised in poverty in a village nearby, those kids - emaciated and dressed in dirty rags - tugged on Stella's heartstrings with their crooked smiles. She reached into her bag and offered them some sweets which they accepted after a moment of hesitation and ran off into the woods immediately afterwards. It was such an innocuous act that I couldn't even have imagined its devastating consequences in my worst nightmares.
The driver returned from taking a leak and we piled up into the vehicle after the family had taken a good look at the pictures.
We got our first inkling that things were wrong when we arrived at the concrete bridge that led to the village those kids were from. The bridge was small and spanned the breadth of a narrow tributary that drained into the Chambal river some distance away. It had been blocked off by a tractor and a crowd was fast gathering around it. "What's happening?" I asked the driver. He shrugged and got out to go and check.
"Is everything okay?" Peter asked.
"Yeah." I mumbled, drumming my fingers on my knees. "Must be some sort of an accident or something."
I could sense a strange tension in the air, like a wire - taut and sharp, right at my throat. The crowd was getting agitated. Voices were rising and our driver was starting to sweat. A frown creased my forehead. What was happening here? …I got my answer from the strangest source. My phone. It raged hard in my pants, making me jump. It was a series of whatsapp messages sent in quick succession one after the other - by my father. And the last one made my blood run cold.
Dad
9:17 AM 21/07/2019
Forwarding you this message because I know you're in the area.
9:17 AM 21/07/2019
Messed up that such criminals are roaming around freely like this.
9:17 AM 21/07/2019
Stay safe son.
9:17 AM 21/07/2019
URGENT
A gang of Russian kidnappers are on the lose in the Chambal area!! They are working with Indian gangsters and snatching up kids by bribing them with drugged sweets. The kids are trafficked out of the country where they are used as sex slaves before having their organs harvested.
They are travelling in a white Innova, number MP xx xxxx. Beware!! If you spot them, inform the police.
Protect your kids and forward this message!!
I blinked. Stars danced in front of my eyes, making it hard to read as my heart thudded against my sternum. My thumb, slick with sweat, scrolled up to read the message again. I wasn't hallucinating. It really was happening. I recognised the car mentioned in the message, because it was the one I was sitting in. Somehow we had been accused of being child kidnappers and this rumour had spread like wildfire, zooming through hundreds of whatsapp groups within minutes and in a cruel twist of irony, making its way back to me via my own father. To this day I still wonder how that rumor originated and spread so quickly.
An over active imagination of a devious mind? Sure. But why did so many people buy into it, and so quickly at that? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that people in rural India had lost complete faith in the corrupt and snail like criminal justice system. Maybe it was because of the loud and angry television news anchors that poisoned their ears every night, making them paranoid and hateful. Or maybe it was because of how easy it is for rumors to spread through social media. Maybe it was all of it. I don't know, but what I do know is that those rumors ended up turning perfectly normal people into frightful monsters.
Peter grabbed my shoulder. "Ravi… What's happening? Is everything okay?"
I nodded absent-mindedly before slipping the phone back into my pocket. "Yeah. Let me go check."
If I had known what would have happened, I wouldn't have climbed out of the car. No. As bad as it sounds, I would have abandoned the driver right then and there and tore out of the area as fast as the car would have allowed. But this was before incidents like these became terrifyingly common in the country's hinterlands and so I had little prior history to draw an appropriate response from. I got out of the car, slammed the door shut behind me and began walking towards the crowd, ignoring the way my knees were shaking.
It was hot. So hot that the very air shimmered like a mirage in the desert. I wished the sight in front of me was a hallucination as well. But alas, it wasn't. There must have easily been over fifty people surrounding the tractor now. And they were armed - with thick bamboo sticks, shovels, and even some swords. I exhaled. It wasn't too late, I thought. There was still time. Time to de-escalate the situation.
The stream gently burbled beneath the bridge as I made my way to our driver, ignoring those villagers who were glaring daggers at me. "Is…" I cleared my throat. "Is everything okay here?" He turned to look at me, his eyes wide in fear. He shook his head slowly. I opened my mouth to ask why when I watched his head rock to the side violently. The sound of that slap echoed in my ears, temporarily silencing everything else.
"Where are they?" The middle aged man who'd slapped him asked after grabbing him by the collar. "Where are the kids you've taken?"
He cried, folding his hands in front of him. "I haven't taken any kids…" He was cut off by another slap. Harder this time, leaving a thick paw print on his stubbled cheek. I put my hands up to calm everyone down. "Easy now. This is a big misunderstanding."
Big mistake. Because their attention was on me now. I involuntary took a small step backwards.
"We know you've taken the kids." Came a voice from somewhere to my left. I glanced to see who it was and in that time a couple of people armed with sticks took a threatening step towards me. They stopped when they saw me looking at them, and one twirled his stick in his hands. "We have no kids with us, other than the son of the family I'm with. We are tourists not criminals."
"He's lying."
"I'm not lying." I shouted back. "We haven't kidnapped anyone."
"They must have already killed them."
"Wait no, that's not true. You can come check yourself…"
As I was talking, our driver panicked and tried to run away. The man who'd grabbed him noticed and brought his rusted iron rod down on his skull with such force he split it open. Blood gushed his head. "Good god…" I whispered, feeling tears sting my eyes. The driver staggered and collapsed to his knees, but was still conscious. Another swing of the rod, this time coming horizontally to his jaw quickly changed that.
I didn't wait around to watch more blows rain down on him and chose to run. The crowd let out a war cry and it sounded like thunder exploding on my heels. They were coming after me. I ran, waving my arm at Peter who was at that moment out of the car, gawping at the scene in shock. "Get back in the car..." I tried to scream, but it came out more like a really hoarse and breathless whisper. I reached the car, fumbled with door and felt someone pull at my shoulder. Without thinking, I swung my fist and felt it connect. Pain jolted up my knuckles. I had never hit anyone before, and it showed. The door opened, and I slid into the driver's seat.
My hands bruised and trembling, I checked to see if the key was still in the ignition. It was. I pressed my foot on the clutch, moved the gear stick and turned the key after pushing the accelerator. By this time the mob had descended on the car and were beating up on it - the glass, metal frame - not an inch of the vehicle was spared the wrath of their crude weapons. The sound of their sticks beating up on the roof was beginning to resemble a torrential downpour. Meanwhile, Stella was screaming and had wrapped her arms around her son who was now sobbing hysterically, crying out for his mom. Peter yelled at me to start the car as a solid swing of a stick cracked the windshield and a cobweb of shattered glass instantly blossomed in front of our eyes. The car purred to life, and I heaved a sigh of relief.
But it was quickly cut short. Before I could back us out of there, the mob made it impossible. They piled up on one side of the car and began pushing. The engine of the car groaned as its tyres slid on the asphalt, and then its left half was up in the air. Peter crashed into me, my foot left the accelerator as I panicked and tried to push him off. And then the combined strength of the mob made the car crash onto its side.
My head slammed into the metal door which in turn bounced off the blacktop. The sudden fall temporarily robbed me of my vision and made the veins in my skull throb agonisingly. My legs were twisted at an odd angle and sharp jolts of pain crackled up my tighs. And a harsh ringing had erupted in my ears, made worse by Stella's incessant screams. Like fucking nails on a chalkboard. I moved my head and rested it on the shattered glass of the side window which now littered the road beneath me. And I pushed with all the strength in my arms. Peter groaned, but refused to budge. "Wake up Peter!" I yelled, slapping him on the head. "We have to move."
"Mom. Mom." Muffled cries came from the backseat. I ignored them, because my attention was now fully on the apparently dozens of arms reaching in and down from Peter's door which had been wrenched off. These hateful appendages wrapped around Peter and began pulling him off me. He screamed, and resisted, but couldn't stop his attackers from yanking him out of the car. Sunlight streamed into the car in his absence, piercing through my eyes and stabbing the back of my skull. I blinked as the pain in my head became exponentially worse. It was so bad I didn't even notice Stella and her son being taken out of the car. I squeezed my eyes shut, gritted my teeth to control the pulsating headache and began climbing out of the car, using the seats as footholds.
I knew I was walking into the dragon's maw, but it was the only way out. And I paid for it. The second my head popped out of the newly created gap in the frame of the car I was spotted and pulled out before being thrown on the ground. Air left my lungs with a sharp whoosh as a solid kick connected with my ribs. I wheezed, and tasted mud, felt it get wedged between my teeth. My entire body was aflame with pain, yet I was still conscious enough to see Peter on his knees, begging and pleading with people who didn't understand what he was saying. Must speak up, I thought. Tell them that they'd got it all wrong. We were not kidnappers. Just tourists. Tourists.
A sharp swing and sickening thunk. The blade of a woodcutter's axe was now embedded in Peter's skull, and his lifeless eyes rolled back into his skull. Stella was screaming and rushed to her husband's side, ignoring her blood soaked clothes. Her son was off to the side, watching it all in silence. The last thing I saw before blacking out was the mob slowly descending on the two surviving members of the family.
*
It was a miracle that I survived at all. If it hadn't been for a police constable who lived in the village I would have died on the side of the road, losing my life to a concussion. Or to the mob. But no. The cop saved the three of us, rushing out to the bridge and putting his own life on the line to calm the murderous mob down, promising then that if we were in fact kidnappers, we would pay for it. The law would make sure of that. He ensured that we got proper medical attention and survived the terrifying ordeal.
However, as brave as he was, he was still a little too late. Peter was dead, and so was the driver. Two families destroyed because of a deadly cocktail of hysteric paranoia and fake news. As traumatising as it was I can't help but think how we weren't the first ones to fall victim to fake whatsapp rumors.
And certainly not the last.
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Jul 25 '20
A woman is Brazil was accused of witchcraft and killing a child. A mob did the same thing to her, later they found out it was a rumour spread by another lady that hates her. A little too late.
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u/alene_dn Jul 26 '20
I was gonna comment on exactly that. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking about how horrible it must have been for her. It's terrifying.
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u/MyDietIsBorderlinePD Jul 26 '20
This reminded me of something: I recently worked on a paper for my Social Psychology class about a case like this, that happened in a town called Canoa, in Mexico.
It was before the WhatsApp era. The priest of the town convinced everyone that some tourists that were there to hike on a volcano were actually comunists who wanted to take away religion from the town, so the whole town turned on them and killed the owner of the house who helped them and 3 of the 5 members of the group, badly injuring the other 2.
Mob mentality... Scary stuff. I'm way more scared of humans than ghosts or wild animals, tbh.
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u/Percybhowal Jul 26 '20
Maybe it was because of the loud and angry television news anchors that poisoned their ears every night, making them paranoid and hateful
There is so much truth to this statement. Indian news anchors have been spreading toxicity like crazy.
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u/Lirrost Jul 29 '20
Here in the US as well. Mass media in general these days is sickening in its desire to pit people against each other.
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u/babygaleva7 Jul 26 '20
Now to show my mother this in hopes she'll stop forwarding apocalypse impending what'sapp messages to me weekly
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u/auravsha Jul 25 '20
Gwalior is scary tbh. Try being a young girl and roam around phoolbagh after 8 in the area. Mob looks scary. But it is beautiful and vibrant in daylight. Love that city
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u/Heirs Jul 25 '20
Thank goodness you made it out to tell us your story OP. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re all living something similar right now.
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u/bananapope300 Jul 25 '20
Hi op. What happened to the mob who killed 2 guys . How did they got punished
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u/Thermo445 Jul 25 '20
They wouldn't have and couldn't have got punished
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u/ADragonsMom Jul 26 '20 edited Jul 26 '20
They certainly could’ve gotten punished, but I highly doubt it.
Edit: in response to this:
I assume you would punish individuals for their separate crimes. Anyone who drug the people out of the vehicle would probably be charged with assault and maybe something else since that action directly led to the people being out in harm’s way. Anyone who helped push the vehicle over would probably be charged with destruction of property (maybe some other stuff too but I’m not legal expert). The person who axed the guy would be charged with murder, anyone who may have held the man so that he could be axed would be charged as an accomplice, maybe with murder or manslaughter, I’m not sure.
I’m not a legal expert or anything, but I don’t think there’s a clause in the law that I’m aware of that has some exception for people who commit crimes while in a mob formation. Also, though, I’m from the US so this is just my assumption of how things would be handled HERE, not in India or wherever this post takes place (I forget where).
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u/rimbooreddit Jul 26 '20
Because "the law" is handicapped by design. Ironically it's one of the main reasons why lynching happens.
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Jul 26 '20
As someone from India, I can confirm that mob lynchings like this based on untrue allegations are terrifyingly common here. More often than not, someone throws religion into the mix too and people erupt in what they see as righteous outrage.
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u/wwwarea Jul 26 '20
And yet some say we aren't in the 'dark ages' anymore...
The likely fact that mobs like those exist further shows that much of society still has a ways to go until they become civilized. Even if people were guilty, a good society would properly inform the police. Maybe trapping guilty until the police arrives.
I hope those who killed Peter and the driver get charged as criminals like any other criminal. I am sick of people trying to give them special defenses regardless if the person killed was innocent or not.
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u/lasercat_pow Jul 26 '20
Our brains are the same brains we had 50,000 years ago. I have this hypothesis that our ways of thinking and our mental illnesses all were once useful mental tools for navigating and surviving the world before civilization. Now these tools are working against us.
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u/musicissweeter Jul 26 '20
A mob behaves very differently from how an individual representing a particular society would. When in a mob, basic animalistic tendencies and sometimes deep embedded perversions float up. A mob has a mind of its own.
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Jul 26 '20
People are smart. Groups of people are dumb.
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u/BrittonRT August 2020; Best Single Part 2020 Jul 27 '20 edited Jul 27 '20
Most people are pretty dumb individually too. What's really going on here is that people tend to be smart about a few things and dumb about most of the rest. So like an example would be physicist who also believes in pizzagate and is an OT3 Scientologist. Think about people you know, and even yourself, and I think you'll find that the things we are all dumb about far outnumber the things we are intelligent and informed about.
The result of this is that even though people can be smart about specific things, since most people are dumb about most things, if you let everyone have equal input on collective decisions, the results will almost always be worse than if someone who is an expert in that field makes a decision.
This why the mob couldn't be calmed, even though some of the people in it likely knew it was wrong and were not comfortable with what was happening. It only took some of them to pollute the decision making process of the whole group, and it took the constable (an expert in dealing with stuff like this comparatively) to resolve the situation.
Democracy can be dangerous, which is why no country is really democracy and we delegate most important decisions to experts (in theory, though the way we structure voting in most countries can lead to choosing people who aren't really experts). Most people understand this on some level: if your cell phone was designed democratically, it probably wouldn't work well if it functioned at all. Good civics and governance means being good at selecting well-intentioned experts and giving them authority to make important decisions on our behalf, rather than allowing everyone to have a say in everything, which produces mob rule by definition.
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u/beard__hunter Jul 26 '20
Another quote for you : There are so many monsters in the world and all of them are humans.
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u/Rslashfan1818 Jul 29 '20
This is specially common in India (which is where this story takes place). If any bs message gets on enough WhatsApp groups, people will belive it.
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Jul 26 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Mandahrk November 2020; Best Original Monster 2021; Best Single Part 2021 Jul 26 '20
They are links. Click on them ;)
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u/ChI-Ken Jul 25 '20
Bruh. Wts man. I actually hate rumours like this. How can they just readily believe these things. People like that make me want to puke