I heard it for Michael Jackson first

I loved the response he gave for that rumor.
It was essentially... "Do you think I'd be here giving this interview if I could do that?
Love that he knew about the rumor.

Also Richard Geere stuck a hamster in his ass
- *Geeere
  
  the sound Richard made when lemmiwinks reached the small intestine
- Bruh, it was a gerbil
  Leave the innocent hamsters out of it!
  
  Oh, that makes way more sense...
- And Rod Stewart had his stomach pumped because he sucked off too many dudes.
  
  Stewart actually mentioned this in a recent interview. According to him, he had a gay personal assistant that he ended up firing, and the guy spread this rumor for revenge.

It's such a believable rumor though.
- I definitely don't not believe it
  
  Yeah but middle school you totally would
  Edit: got me with yer frickin double negative you bastard
- You don’t need to remove any ribs to do that, though…
  
  I think more than flexibility plays a role here.

Not as impressive but in the town where I grew up there is a really skinny woman who seems to be jogging like non stop. When I was in elementary school there was a rumor saying she had some disease which would make her heart stop if she stopped running and all the kids thought it was true. A few years ago when mentionning it to a younger sister (6 years difference) I learnt the rumor was still going strong when she was a kid, and then we both learnt that it was still the case when our even younger sister (12 years difference) was a kid.
- There was an old man and his elderly wife that would take regular walks by my school as a kid. The woman looked like she was made of plastic and the rumors were that she was a giant doll. They called her the barbie lady. When my sister went to school it was just the man walking and the rumors were that he melted his wife and made his cane with her. Kids are WILD. Those poor elderly people were just trying to have a damn walk lol
  Damn... It was just him walking though that sucks :(
- A rumour so strong that your friend's uncle (who works at Nintendo) heard it and designed spoink

- There's a tutorial on the hub. Which I shouldn't know.

Millenial from Switzerland - can confirm.
- Denmark checking in
  
  Austria as well
  
  Russia here, Millennial. Can confirm, heard the rumor.
- Netherlands checking in. Can confirm.
  
  So you're the one who got that username! Congrats!
- Germany here. Heard the rumor as well.
- Mexico checking in. I heard the rumor.

That rumour was everywhere by the end of '94. Not a lot of millenials in high school then. Almost all Gen X.
- Late '80s. I was in middle school. That shit spread like wildfire.
  
  I heard the rumor back in '74 when Malta became a republic.
- And by the time Millennials were in High School we almost certainly had Internet.
  
  Who’s this “we”, white man?
  …I was poor and didn’t have it until I started art school in ‘99
- I heard it in 5th or 6th grade around 2001-2002. So still millennial. The post says elementary school not high-school... Just not the 90s in my case
- ouch

here is another one: did you know that Marilyn Manson was "Paul" from The Wonder Years
- Come on man. Don't do Josh Saviano dirty like that...
- That one is at least easy to disprove and isn’t even plausible. Marilyn Manson totally had ribs removed, just not until later on when he lost most of his shock value and he needed to get it back
  Turns out all he really had to do was be a heinous sexual criminal

Never heard of him until the rumor. Took one look at him and believed it 110%
- “Bro, just look at the back of this cd case. They’re drinking his piss through a hose. Of course he had his ribs removed to blow himself. He’d cut himself in half to do it!”
- Never heard of him
  Fuck, we're getting old.
  
  It felt like it was going to take forever too, and here we are, with our loose skin and our old balls. Gross.
  :p

Rod Stewart’s pumped stomach is unimpressed
- I heard that one too!
  Apparently he addressed it himself:
  "I have never orally pleasured even a solitary sailor, let alone a ship's worth in one evening. And I have never had my stomach pumped, either of naval-issue semen or of any other kind of semen."
- What's this one about?
  
  Something about needing his stomach pumped because there was too much semen in it.
- Heard it for Gwen Stefani
  
  Heard it was Lil Kim
- Heard that was Marc Almond

Even further back, there was the same rumor about Gene Simmons from Kiss
- I heard he cut the small thingy under his tongue so he could get it out farther, is that real or not 😅 ?
  
  I believe that this is not an unnormal thing to do especially for babies that are having trouble eating
  
  Yes! (That thingy being the frenulum). I heard that rumor when I was a kid back in Argentina. I’m 50 now. Afaik it’s not true. He just have a long tongue.
  Edit: from his autobiography:
  I was oblivious, for the first thirteen years of my life, that I was endowed with a large oral appendage, my superlong tongue. It really was longer than everyone else's, and I was soon to find out that having a long tongue came in handy with the girls.

Glad to see the other misinformation classics like Richard Gere's gerbil mentioned.
Anyone remember Jamie Lee Curtis was secretly a hermaphrodite?
It was known. I don't trust anything I learned pre Internet anymore, including the number of planets.
- When I was a kid in the '70s the big rumor was that Rod Stewart had to go to the hospital once to have a gallon of sperm pumped out of his stomach. I was surprised when I saw a fairly recent interview with Stewart where he mentioned this rumor and he was even aware of where it came from.
  
  This rumour was recycled for New Kids on the Block in the 80s.
  
  Heard this about Lil Kim
  
  I mean a gallon of anything is a lot but if you drank too quickly I think you'd just vomit
- Where's the one about Rod Stewart's stomach getting pumped at the hospital? That was a doozy that I heard in two different countries and two different languages, and this was in the late-70s/early-80s, people didn't even have fax machines then. How did this one get around so quickly?
- Anyone remember Jamie Lee Curtis was secretly a hermaphrodite?
  Yes, I remember that one!
  And Catherine the Great really liked horses...
  
  It wasn't millennials who started that one. I heard it from my genx history teacher. Who honestly I had a lot of respect for at the time, maybe because he told us stories like that, but the more I learn about the world the more I find he was so full of shit and he was like my favorite teacher so its disappointing. One of these days I'm going to find out that the Maginot Line was actually a great idea and if you are France after WW1 you should always build the Maginot Line.
  Re Catherine the Great's horse thing, my understanding is that the stories were contemporaneous with her rule and that all powerful women in europe had similar sorts of things said about them. There as a whole early tabloid industry describing in detail the various imagined exploits of Marie Antoinette.

Heh. I think that was one of the first things I ever went down a rabbit hole to understand on The Internet. And it eventually led me to learn that with just a bit of yoga (which you should do anyway since it is a great way to improve flexibility and general muscle health) you don't need to remove the rib. Admittedly, I have too much of a "dad bod" and a "beer gut" these days. But... it is totally a thing.
- This is why I’m losing weight. It’s not as motivating as I hoped it would be.
- it is totally a thing.
  What was your experience?
  
  It’s… okay.
  Feels like sucking a dick (which is fine if you’re into that, which I am), but with a lot of back and abs discomfort, which I am definitely not into.
  But yeah it’s not actually super hard to do, just needs a few weeks of practice, and maybe a slightly lower body fat percentage so you aren’t getting in your own way.
  
  He sucked his own winky
- https://streamable.com/w578u

I went to a 20 person private school in rural Oregon at the time and even heard it.
That and everyone drawing Stussy symbols for a hot minute.
- Hell, I'm from a South American country and even I heard it!
- New Zealand checking in, for Marilyn Manson and for the stussy symbols.
- It's the infinity symbol 😂😂😂.

Amazingly this rumor actually has its origin from Gabriele D'Annunzio in the 1930s. It has been repeated for other famous people throughout history.
- I heard it about David Bowie in the 1980s.

I heard it was Prince in the early 90s,before the internet.
- same here

Damn, that rumor was still going around in the early 2010s when I graduated high school.

After 100h playtime of Pokemon red/blue, MS Anne would come back
- that's when you go around the side of the ship and use a level 100 Mewtwo with strength to move the truck to find Mew
  
  Having caught Mew by fishing 100 times off this one particular pier with the good rod.
- If nobody's done a ROM hack that implements as many bullshit rumors as possible, I'm sorely tempted.
  
  That would actually be amazing. School rumors edition
- MS Anne... featuring Clippy!
  It looks like you're trying to catch #151!

I remember that one.

I heard it about Ron Jeremy, which made sense because, allegedly there's a porn out there in which he does suck himself, but I have no way of verification, as I am not aware of the film name, and I'm not watching a bunch of 70s porn to find the right one
- He wouldn't need any ribs removed to do that though. Manson probably didn't either. You just need to have enough dong length and not be fat.
  
  This guy sucks his own dick.

The rumor I remember more was that the boobs he had in a music video were actual implants and not just an external costume.

I definitely believed that for way too long.

What can I say, it sounded entirely plausible.

Before that I remember hearing a rumor that Rod Stewart had had a hot hair curler shoved up his butt by his wife bc she had caught him having a homosexual affair. Years later I heard the exact same rumor about a local used car dealer and knew that it probably wasn’t true, but it was interesting that the same rumor had cropped up about different people (heard these in different states as well, so it wasn’t just the same people repeating it).

high schools too.

AND he was Paul from The Wonder Years!

In the 80’s, I always heard it was Gene Simmons.
- I heard it about David Bowie back then.

The Birth of the Hivemind

Used to go to festivals in the late 90s/early 2000s and there was ALWAYS a rumor that one of the Chuckle Brothers had died. Or Cliff Richard.
- Or Cliff Richard.
  Simultaneously the most likely person, and the least likely person to have died at basically any time
- Related to that, Abe Vigoda is still dead.

Wait, he didn't do that? I'm confused now..

i know the guy who invented the phrase weak sauce

The same way that every kid in the 80s knew where the hidden 1-up in level 1-1 of Mario Bros was.

And everyone knew how to draw the "smile" graffiti style "S".
And everyone knew some version of the promotion where you supposedly got free something if you got a Tootsie Pop wrapper with the Indian and the star on it.
- I had forgotten about the Tootsie Pop wrapper!