it wouldnt matter if the boy was discovered later at a friends house. the stories are BASED on true events WITH a supernatural twist. how stupid would it have been if they had found him at the end with a billion and one questions. the event of the boy disappearing in the closet is what the segment is being based on. and just cause a story is fact doesnt mean that every single thing that happens is actually how it happened idiots.
sharethe whole thing was made up except for the truth the kid vanished from the closet. one of the 3 writers responsible for this segment said back in 2006 that that they made stuff up even on the factual segments. They were based on factual stories but the story shown on tv was made up. According to the writer sometime after the show aired they looked up more info on the store and discovered the kid had managed to escape through the ceiling and made his way out the attic and out the outside of the house. Apparently he left behind his shoes, shirt and jacket. Maybe it was easier escaping without them on. He ran away from home and it wasn't the first time he had run away from home. He'd done it several times. He was later found at a friend's house and he went back home.
shareLet me bend everyone's ear for a second. All of these or most of these so called true stories even but especially the shocking ones are usually embellished. In fact even movies that are based on actual events, are embellished.
Therefore I doubt but wouldn't put it past the kid that he did actually take all his clothes off b4 escaping (or perhaps there was a trunk of old clothes in the attic which he put on)
I heard a similiar story where this kid thought there was a monster behind the refrigerator.
Well turns out, the family had an old well in the backyard. Now down that well led to an entrance of a bomb shelter. Now that wasn't the only entrance to the bomb shelter. There was a fake wall behind the fridge which also led to the bomb shelter.
The older brother and gis friends would always use this to tease the younger brother whenever the mother was out or not there.
Eventually though, the mother did catch what was going on one day and really blew up. She punished the older son the whole entire summer.
That's just one version I heard.
That's a pretty cool story, too. Oooh, secret passageways... But, sigh...kids can be so cruel; glad the older one got what was coming to him. >:/
shareI'm not going to lie, I would have totally done the same thing to my younger brothers when I was a kid - if I had the same scenerio as above.
shareI think the true "idiot" is anyone who needs to waste their time and effort getting irritated because other people enjoy and believe things that they do not believe in.
The majority of us are intelligent enough to know that these stories do not happen in the story the same way that they happen in real life. If they were exact replicas, Jonathan Frakes wouldn't constantly be telling us that they are "similar" to actual events or are based on actual events.
We watch the show because we enjoy it. You come here and post and use your time to insult people because they like something you don't. We still have a show we enjoy, and you used your time for a pointless pursuit. Who then becomes the real idiot?
It was true and yes embellished, but It was based on an event that happened in 1989 in the Fort Lauderdale, FL area.
shareI just started watching this again because somehow the show came to mind recently. Just really enjoyed it as a kid. Now I'm watching it to have a laugh. It's such an entertainingly dumb series.
Monster in the closet is one of the better examples of why the show is funny. Boy got eaten by a monster in the closet: FACT!
That's so retarded! You can't say, 'well it's true a kid was in a closet for a bit and disappeared, so it's based on a true story.' The implication in the show is that the monster was there all along and one of the taunting siblings got eaten by it. No it wasn't, no he didn't, the show is ridiculous.
I'm challenging myself to pick the Fact or Fiction segments at the moment and two episodes in I'm scoring pretty well. My theory is that the more plausible the story is the more likely it will be fiction. For instance: guy is about to get electric chair, electric chair doesn't work, they never figure out why but he gets another 24 hours, next day new evidence comes to light and he gets let go.
Even if they didn't find a reason the chair didn't work it's possible there was some kind of temporary issue that resolved itself without interference and before anyone could figure it out. New evidence gets people off death row sometimes, in this case it just came to light at the very last minute and at the same time as an incredibly low odds event. one in a hundred million odd events happen sometimes, nothing supernatural about the story...FICTION!
Boy gets eaten by a monster in a closet: FACT!
EDIT: I did get the 'Adulterer Accidentally Kills Himself With a Chainsaw Bullet' story wrong using this this method though. While I thought the concept of a chainsaws power being enough to push a bullet out of a tree with enough momentum to kill a man was questionable I'm not well versed in physics so I erred on the side of caution and deemed it plausible and went with 'Fiction.' That ended up being 'Fact' so I'm assuming it's scientifically impossible.
xD It is kinda funny that some of the more believable, "Yeah-that-could-have-happened" stories turn out to be works of complete fiction, while other outrageous-sounding ones are revealed as (basically) factual...meaning, someone believes it occurred, and was able to provide the original researchers with enough detailed information and/or evidence for them to accept it. How much liberty the writers took with those "facts," we're not sure...and whether you want to accept that such things really did/do happen is, of course, up to you. (Of course, Jonathan Frakes, Don LaFontaine, and Campbell Lane implored us to open our minds to the possibilities...;) In the case of the monster in the closet, I think the conclusion is not so much "A MONSTER IS THE OOOOOONLY POSSIBILITY" as "Well, how else can one explain a child entering a completely sealed closet and vanishing?"
shareAt the time, the story was true. A kid went into the closet and he was gone when they opened it.
However, it was discovered sometime later that the kid snuck out of the closet through a ceiling tile, went out the attic window and hid at a friend's house until their parents found him hiding in their attic.
"I'll go,because I am Cinema!" - Ben (Man Bites Dog)
In even another instance, I heard that the nightmare warning one was actually supposed to be TRUE, although I think it was FALSE.
Warning; spoilers for that one.
The gardener was indeed planning on killing the husband for insurance and the money, so he could get the money. He never knew that the wife had this dream. But what the wife didn't know, nor what the husband didn't know, is that this guy was precognitive. He could actually, predict the future. That is how he planned to kill the husband and it was supposed to be the very next day when the horse was wild. Therefore, he planted the sharp garden shears right in the bush nearby, so the husband would fall on them. Now he cashes in, because this was not murder, but an accident. Unfortunately, he was fired but yet he'd still get his revenge
"Be excellent to each other...And....Party on!"
It's been awhile since I have seen this episode, but as I recall, it was intimated that there really was a monster living in the closet who ate that kid! It was absurd that they claimed that segment to be based on fact!
shareWell, the intimation was that he was under attack by SOMETHING, or something was scaring him, and he then vanished entirely--save for his clothes. It was left very enigmatic. I never fully assumed that there would've been a physical monster living in there that ate him...but I don't know which I find less believable: That something in a closet could cause a child to enter and never exit, or that a child could have created some secret exit that NO ONE among the police and family members were able to find in tearing it apart. 8-|
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"My Little Throny! I used to wonder what bloodshed could be..."
I found out that there was no monster at all, the kid actually escaped through the ceiling in the closet and ran away from home for 2 weeks hiding at his friends house, he was found safe.
Here the reddit post someone actually contacted one of the producers who finds stories like these.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/nsrmw/iama_request_the_kid_who_had_a_monster_in_his/
Is it wrong to find that disappointing? xD
Not to mention seriously bizarre that the family AND police could've possibly missed a loose ceiling panel...π I mean, come on.
Normally I just watch this show with a grain of salt. I can understand when the supernatural events such as, the one where the woman is crossing the bridge and she sees her biological mother warning her to turn back, but she never knew she was adopted or who that woman was, that for some reason is more logical than this story.
A boy who vanishes in a closet, and then James Brolin tells you that oh by the way they never found the boy...oh come on. I had to do my research on that one, it just didn't make sense at all.
But, I still agree with you about the missing ceiling panel, my only guess is that maybe it was a small town and they probably didn't really look hard enough considering the circumstances, I mean can you blame them tho. Mom calls 911 and says my son disappeared in a closet, not many people would take that call seriously.
True; it's definitely one of the more "WTF?! We've GOTTA know more about that...!" ones. In fact, it's the single most-discussed story. It is hard to believe, for sure, but when a kid goes missing for a significant amount of time, and the closet is supposedly the last place he was seen...I dunno, you'd think they would have all searched a lot harder and scoured every inch of that danged closet. ππ
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